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NEW YORK CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 
 
 Dr. R. S. STORRS' ORATION 
 
 ON 
 
 The DECLARATiOiN OF Independence,, 
 
 AND 
 
 The Effects of It. 
 
 ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY, 
 900 Broadway, Cor. 20th Street, New York. 
 
V / 
 
 > 
 
 s^^ 
 
 » 
 
THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 
 
 OF 
 
 AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, 
 
 AT 
 
 THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC, NEW YORK, 
 JULY ^tk. 1876. 
 
 Hon. JOHN A. DIX, PRESIDING. 
 
 WITH THE 
 
 ORATION, AND THE OTHER EXERCISES. 
 
 
 
COPYRIGHT 1876, BY 
 
 Anson D. F. Randolph & Co. 
 
 E. O. Jenkins, Printer, 20 North William St., N. Y. 
 
ORDER OF EXERCISES. 
 
1776. 1S-/6. 
 
 CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 
 
 ANNIVERSARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 Signing of the Declaration 
 
 OF INDEPENDENCE, 
 
 AT 
 
 TiaiE ^^ O .i^ ID E IS/l "2^ 01^ IvlXJSIO, 
 TUESDAY, JULY 4th, 1876, 
 
 UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE 
 
 J\rEJV YORK CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION COMMITTEE. 
 
 RUSH C. HAWKINS, Chairman. J. P. PANNES, Secretary. 
 
 Gen. ALEXANDER SHALER, 
 Chairman Committee on Illumination, Decoration, Procession, and Police. 
 
 HENRY HAVEMEYER, 
 Chairman Committee on Finance. 
 
 THURLOW WEED, 
 Chairman Committee on Oration, Ode, and Invitation. 
 
 PAUL GOEPEL, 
 Chairman Committee on Music. 
 
 The Committee on Oration, Ode, Invitation, Etc., was composed of the following 
 
 Gentlemen : 
 
 PETER COOPER, THURLOW WEED, 
 
 D. VAN NOSTRAND, AUGUSTUS SCHELL, 
 
 SAMUEL B. RUGGLES, CHARLES A. PEABODY, 
 
 GEO. JONES, DEXTER A. HAWKINS. 
 
PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 
 
 A full report of the address of the Hon. John A. Dix was received 
 too late to be inserted in regular order. The publishers give the address 
 in full below. 
 
 ADDRESS BY THE HON. JOHN A. DIX. 
 
 One hundred years ago to-day, in our sister City of 
 Philadelphia, a band of fearless men, at the peril of their 
 lives, and of all they held dear, set at defiance one of the 
 most powerful nations of Europe, and proclaimed to the 
 world that the American Colonies, which they represented, 
 were free and independent States ; assuming for them, to use 
 their own language, among the powers of the earth, the 
 separate and equal station to which nature and nature's 
 God entitled them. 
 
 The three millions in whose behalf the Declaration of 
 Independence was made, are now more than forty millions ; 
 and wherever patriotic hearts are to be found — whether in 
 the crowded thoroughfares of cities and towns, or in the 
 quietude of rural habitations — they are overflowing with 
 gratitude for our prosperity, our good name among the 
 nations, our free institutions, our wide-spread domain never 
 again to be pressed by a servile foot, and our deliverance 
 from the dangers through which we have passed ; above 
 all, the late fearful peril of disunion. You will hear from 
 eloquent lips the story of our toils and our triumphs, and of 
 the fulfillment of that memorable prophecy uttered a century 
 and a half ago of the progress of the star of empire west- 
 ward. But, first let us listen to the Rev. Dr. Adams, and 
 unite with him in acknowledging our thankfulness to 
 Almighty God for our preservation during the hundred 
 years that are past, and in fervent supplication for His con- 
 tinued favor and protection through the years that are to 
 come. 
 
Programme, 
 
 1. ADDRESS. By the President, Hon. John A. Dix. 
 
 One hundred years ago to-day, in our sister City of Phila- 
 delphia, a band of patriots set at defiance one of the most 
 powerful nations of Europe. We, their descendants, in 
 sympathy with that great deed, have come together to 
 express our veneration for their patriotism, courage, and 
 sagacity. We have met to honor those who laid the foun- 
 dation of our nation, and promulgated the principles of free- 
 dom. The 3,000,000 of that distant day are the 40,000,000 
 of to-day ; and wherever a patriotic heart exists it will be 
 found overflowing with gratitude that our land will never 
 more be trodden by a servile foot, and that we have safely 
 passed the deadly peril of disunion. 
 
 2. HYMN. " Lord, Hear Our Prayer." 
 
 3. PRAYER. Rev. William Adams, D.D. 
 
 4. READING OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 Mr. George Vandenhoff. 
 
 5. CENTENNIAL ODE. By William C. Bryant. 
 
 Through storm and calm the years have led 
 
 Our nation on from stage to stage, 
 A century's space, until we tread 
 
 The threshold of another age. 
 
 We see where o'er our pathway swept 
 
 A torrent stream of blood and fire ; 
 And thank the guardian Power who kept 
 
 Our sacred league of States entire. 
 
 Oh ! checkered train of years, farewell, 
 With all thy strifes and hopes and fears ; 
 
But with us let thy niemoiies dwell, 
 To warn and teach the coming years. 
 
 And thou, the new-beginning age, 
 Warned by the past, and not in vain. 
 
 Write on a fairer, whiter page 
 The record of thy happier reign. 
 
 6. ORATION. Rev. R. S. Storrs, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 7. THE SONG OF 1876. Prize Composition OF the New York 
 
 Centennial Sanger-Verband. Words by Bayard Taylor. 
 
 I. 
 
 Waken, voice of the Land's Devotion ! 
 
 Spirit of freedom, awaken all ! 
 Ring, ye shores, to the song of Ocean, 
 Rivers, answer, and Mountains, call ! 
 
 The golden day has come : 
 
 Let every tongue be dumb 
 That sounded its malice or murmured its fears ; 
 
 She hath won her story ; 
 
 She wears her glory ; 
 We crown her the Land of a Hundred Years ! 
 
 IL 
 
 Out of darkness and toil and danger 
 
 Into the Light of Victory's day, 
 Help to the weak, and home to the stranger, 
 Freedom to all, she hath held her way ! 
 
 Now Europe's orphans rest 
 
 Upon her mother-breast : 
 The voices of Nations are heard in the cheers ; 
 
 That shall cast upon her 
 
 New love and honor, 
 And crown her the Queen of a Hundred Years ! 
 
III. 
 
 North and South, we are met as brothers : 
 East and West, we are wedded as one ! 
 Right of each shall secure our mother's ; 
 Child of each is her faithful son ! 
 
 We give thee heart and hand, 
 
 Our glorious native Land, 
 For battle has tried thee, and time endears ; 
 
 We will write thy story, 
 
 And keep thy glory, 
 As pure as of old for a Thousand Years ! 
 
 8. THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER. 
 
CORRESPONDENCE 
 
 BETWEKN THE COMMITTEE AND THE HON. CHARLES 
 FRANCIS ADAMS. 
 
 New York, May 20, 1876. 
 Hon. Charles Francis Adams, Quincy, Mass. : 
 
 Dear Sir : — The citizens of New York, with gratifying unan- 
 imity, have decided upon celebrating the Centennial Anniversary 
 of American Independence in the spirit of the letter written at 
 Philadelphia, July 5, 1776, by John Adams. The undersigned, 
 appointed to select an Orator for the occasion, have unanimously 
 agreed upon the distinguished grandson of the writer of that letter, 
 and therefore cordially invite you. We earnestly hope that you will 
 find yourself at liberty to accept the invitation. 
 
 The Oration is to be delivered upon the 4th of July, at the 
 Academy of Music. 
 
 We have the honor to subscribe ourselves, with high regards, 
 very respectfully, your obedient servants, 
 
 Peter Cooper, Thurlov/ Weed, Samuel B. Ruggles, 
 George Jones, David Van Nostrand, Augustus Schell, 
 Charles A. Peabody, Dexter A. Hawkins. 
 
 REPLY OF MR. ADAMS. 
 
 Quincy, May 23, 1876. 
 
 Messrs. Peter Cooper, Thurlow Weed, Samuel B. Ruggles, 
 D. Van Nostrand, Augustus Schell, Charles A. Pea- 
 body, George Jones, Dexter A. Hawkins. 
 
 Gentlemen : — It is with the most profound sensibility that I 
 receive your letter, inviting me to deliver an address before you on 
 the approaching celebration of the Centennial Anniversary in the 
 City of New York. I know of nothing which, in the course of my 
 life, has been more flattering to my pride. But it does so happen 
 that more than a month ago, my fellow-citizens of Taunton, and its 
 neighborhood, were kind enough to call upon me for a similar 
 service, and I was impelled by their earnest solicitations to give my 
 consent. Hence, I must pray you to excuse me, and to believe me 
 most gratefully. 
 
 Your humble servant, 
 
 CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. 
 
LETTER OF INVITATION TO Rev. Dr. STORRS. 
 
 New York, May 29, 1876. 
 Rev. and Dear Sir : — 
 
 The undersigned were appointed a Committee, at a meeting of 
 their fellow-citizens, to co-operate with other committees in arrang- 
 ing for an appropriate celebration of the Centennial Anniversary 
 of American Independence. The unanimity of sentiment already 
 manifested justifies the anticipation that the spirit of patriotism 
 which formerly distinguished these annual celebrations is re-awak- 
 ening, and that the fires then kindled upon the altars of Freedom 
 will burn as brightly as ever. 
 
 Our duty, in part, is to select an Orator for the occasion. In view 
 of the traditions associated with his name, our first appeal was to 
 the Hon. Charles Francis Adams, the son of one, and grandson of 
 another, President of the United States ; a gentleman in all re- 
 spects worthy of so rich an inheritance. But a previous engage- 
 ment to deliver an Oration in his own State constrained him to 
 decline our invitation. We now turn, naturally, to an eminent 
 Divine, in an adjacent city, of whose warm sympathy in the move- 
 ment we feel assured ; and, although there is but brief time for 
 preparation, we confidently hope that a sense of patriotic duty 
 will prompt your acceptance of the invitation we now have the 
 honor of extending to you. 
 
 With sentiments of the highest respect, we are, very truly, your 
 
 obedient servants, 
 
 PETER COOPER, 
 THURLOW WEED, 
 SAMUEL B. RUGGLES, 
 D. VAN NOSTRAND, 
 AUGUSTUS SCHELL, 
 GEORGE JONES, 
 CHARLES A. PEABODY 
 DEXTER A. HAWKINS, 
 
 The Reverend Richard S, Storrs, D.D., LL,D,, 
 Brooklyn, N, Y. 
 
LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE. 
 
 Brooklyn, yunc i, 1876. 
 Gentlemen : — 
 
 Your very kind invitation of the 29th ult. is before me. I could 
 not but feel hesitation in any case in undertaking, on brief notice, 
 vi^ith my uncertain and scanty leisure, so prominent a service as that 
 which you propose. This is of course immensely increased by the 
 fact that you ask me now to stand in a place fitly assigned, by con- 
 sent of all, to an eminent American statesman and publicist — the 
 worthy successor of that " Colossus" in the debate by whose vigor- 
 ous eloquence the Declaration was carried triumphantly through 
 the Congress of 1776. It would be absurd for me to attempt any 
 such discourse, at the coming anniversary, as would have been easy 
 to this distinguished citizen. Indeed, in his absence, to fully match 
 the height of the occasion, you would have to unlock the eloquent 
 lips which death sealed, years ago, at Marshfield, or at Boston. But 
 I rejoice in your purpose to commemorate the day which must al- 
 ways continue dear to Americans, in the city whose rapid and 
 splendid progress has added so much in other lands to our national 
 fame ; and I do not feel at liberty to refuse even this service which 
 you have requested, in furtherance of your plans. 
 
 I, therefore, frankly accept your invitation, trusting that your kind- 
 ness will excuse the imperfection with which, under the circumstances, 
 I must expect to set forth such thoughts as are suggested by the close 
 of this eventful and prophetic period in our national history. 
 
 I remain, gentlemen, with highest regard, 
 
 Your friend, and fellow-citizen, 
 
 RICHARD S. STORRS. 
 
 Messrs. Peter Cooper, Thurlow Weed, Samuel B. Ruogles, 
 D. Van Nostrand, Augustus Schell, George Jones, Charles 
 A. Peabody, Dexter A. Hawkins, — Committee. 
 
THE 
 
 Declaration of Independence, 
 
 AND 
 
 THE EFFECTS OF IT. 
 
 AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE 
 THE CITIZENS OF NEW YORK, 
 
 AT THE CELEBRATION OP 
 
 The Centennial Anniversary, 
 
 JULY 4th, 1876. 
 
 RICHARD S. STORRS, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 \y 
 
 ^^ OF CONq^ 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY, 
 
 900 BROADWAY, COR. 20th STREET. 
 1876. 
 
 qr 
 
) 
 
 51? 
 
 COPYKIGHT, 1876, BY 
 
 Anson D. F. Randolph & Co. 
 
ORATION. 
 
 Mr. President : Fellow Citizens :— 
 
 The long-expected day has come, and passing 
 peacefully the impalpable line which separates ages, 
 the Republic completes its hundredth year. The 
 predictions in which affectionate hope gave inspi- 
 ration to political prudence are fulfilled. The fears 
 of the timid, and the hopes of those to whom our 
 national existence is a menace, are alike disappointed. 
 The fable of the physical world becomes the fact of 
 the political ; and after alternate sunshine and storm, 
 after heavings of the earth which only deepened 
 its roots, and ineffectual blasts of lightning whose 
 lurid threat died in the air, under a sky now raining 
 on it benignant influence, the century-plant of Amer- 
 ican Independence and popular Government bursts 
 into this magnificent blossom, of a joyful celebration 
 illuminating the land ! 
 
 With what desiring though doubtful expectation 
 
 those whose action we commemorate looked for the 
 
 possible coming of this day, we know from the 
 
 5 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 records which they have left. With what anxious 
 soHcitude the statesmen and the soldiers of the fol- 
 lowing generation anticipated the changes which 
 might take place before this centennial year should 
 be reached, we have heard ourselves, in their great 
 and fervent admonitory words. How dim and drear 
 the prospect seemed to our own hearts fifteen years 
 since, when, on the fourth of July, 1861, the Thirty- 
 seventh Congress met at Washington with no repre- 
 sentative in either house from any State south of 
 Tennessee and Western Virginia, and when a deter- 
 mined and numerous army, under skillful command- 
 ers, approached and menaced the Capital and the 
 Government, — this we surely have not forgotten ; 
 nor how. In the terrible years which followed, the 
 blood and fire, and vapor of smoke, seemed often- 
 times to swim as a sea, or to rise as a wall, between 
 our eyes and this anniversary. 
 
 ' It cannot outlast the second generation from 
 those who founded it' was the exulting conviction 
 of the many who loved the traditions and state of 
 monarchy, and who felt them insecure before the 
 widening fame in the world of our prosperous Re- 
 public. ' It may not reach its hundredth year ' was 
 the deep and sometimes the sharp apprehension 
 of those who felt, as all of us felt, that their own 
 liberty, welfare, hope, with the brightest political 
 promise of the world, were bound up with the unity 
 and the life of our nation. Never was solicitude 
 
 6 
 
Deliverance of the Nation. 
 
 more intense, never was prayer to Almighty God 
 more fervent and constant — not in the earUest be- 
 ginnings of our history, when Indian ferocity threat- 
 ened that history with a swift termination, not in the 
 days of supremest trial amid the Revolution — than 
 in those years when the nation seemed suddenly 
 split asunder, and forces which had been combined 
 for its creation were clenched and rocking back and 
 forth in bloody grapple on the question of its main- 
 tenance. 
 
 The prayer was heard. The effort and the sacri- 
 fice have come to their fruitage ; and to-day the 
 nation — still one, as at the start, though now ex- 
 panded over such immense spaces, absorbing such 
 incessant and diverse elements from other lands, de- 
 veloping within it opinions so conflicting, interests 
 so various, and forms of occupation so novel and 
 manifold — to-day the nation, emerging from the toil 
 and the turbulent strife, with the earlier and the later 
 clouds alike swept out of its resplendent stellar arch, 
 pauses from its work to remember and rejoice ; with 
 exhilarated spirit to anticipate its future ; with rever- 
 ent heart to offer to God its orreat Te Deum. 
 
 Not here alone, in this great city, whose lines have 
 gone out into all the earth, and whose superb prog- 
 ress in wealth, in culture, and in civic renovvm, is 
 itself the most illustrious token of the power and 
 beneficence of that frame of eovernment under which 
 it has been realized ; not alone in )-onder, I had 
 
Oraiioii at Neiu York. 
 
 almost said adjoining, city, whence issued the paper 
 that first announced our national existence, and 
 where now rises the magnificent Exposition, testi- 
 fying for all progressive States to their respect and 
 kindness toward us, the radiant clasp of diamond 
 and opal on the girdle of the sympathies which inter- 
 weave their peoples with ours ; not alone in Boston, 
 the historic town, first in resistance to British aggres- 
 sion, and foremost in plans for the new and popular 
 organization, one of whose citizens wrote his name, 
 as if cutting it with a plough-share, at the head of all 
 on our great charter, another of whose citizens was 
 its intrepid and powerful champion, aiding Its passage 
 through the Congress ; not there alone, nor yet in 
 other great cities of the land, but in smaller towns, 
 in villages and hamlets, this day will be kept, a 
 secular Sabbath, sacred alike to memory and to hope. 
 Not only, indeed, where men are assembled, as 
 we are here, will it be honored. The lonely ' and 
 remote will have their part in this commemoration. 
 Where the boatman follows the winding stream, or 
 the woodman explores the forest shades ; where the 
 miner lays down his eager drill beside rocks which 
 guard the precious veins; or where the herdsman, 
 along the sierras, looks forth on the seas which now 
 reflect the rising day, which at our midnight shall be 
 gleaming like gold in the setting sun, — there also 
 will the day be regarded, as a day of memorial. The 
 sailor on the sea will note it, and dress his ship in 
 
The Day Widely Recognized. 
 
 its brightest array of flags and bunting. Americans 
 dwelling in foreign lands will note and keep it. 
 
 London itself will to-day be more festive because 
 of the event which a century ago shadowed its streets, 
 incensed its Parliament, and tore from the crown of 
 its obstinate King the chiefest jewel. On the boule- 
 vards of Paris, in the streets of Berlin, and along the 
 leveled bastions of Vienna, at Marseilles and at Flor- 
 ence, upon the silent liquid ways of stately Venice, 
 in the passes of the Alps, under the shadow of church 
 and obelisk, palace and ruin, which still prolong the 
 majesty of Rome ; yea, further East, on the Bospho- 
 rus, and in. Syria ; in Egypt, which writes on the 
 front of its compartment in the great Exhibition, 
 " The oldest people of the world sends its morning- 
 greeting to the youngest nation ;" along the heights 
 behind Bombay, in the foreign hongs of Canton, in 
 the " Islands of the Morning," which found the dawn 
 of their new age in the startling sight of an American 
 squadron entering their bays — everywhere will be 
 those who have thought of this day, and who join 
 with us to greet its coming. 
 
 No other such anniversary, probably, has attracted 
 hitherto such general notice. You have seen Rome, 
 perhaps, on one of those shining April days when the 
 traditional anniversary of the founding of the city fills 
 its streets with civic processions, with military display, 
 and the most elaborate fire-works in Europe; you 
 may have seen Holland, in 1872, when the whole 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 country bloomed with orange on the three-hundredth 
 anniversary of the capture by the sea-beggars of the 
 city of Briel, and of the revolt against Spanish domi- 
 nation which thereupon flashed on different sides 
 into sudden explosion. But these celebrations, and 
 others like them, have been chiefly local. The world 
 outside has taken no wide impression from them. 
 This of ours is the first of which many lands, in dif- 
 ferent tongues, will have had report. Partly because 
 the world is narrowed in our time, and its distant 
 peoples are made neighbors, by the fleeter machine- 
 ries now in use ; partly because we have drawn so 
 many to our population from foreign lands, while the 
 restless and acquisitive spirit of our people has made 
 them at home on every shore ; but partly, also, and 
 essentially, because of the nature and the relations of 
 that event which we commemorate, and of the influ- 
 ence exerted by it on subsequent history, the at- 
 tention of men is more or less challenged, in every 
 centre of commerce and of thought, by this anni- 
 versary. 
 
 Indeed it is not unnatural to feel — certainly it is 
 not irreverent to feel — that they who by wisdom, by 
 valor, and by sacrifice, have contributed to perfect 
 and maintain the institutions which we possess, and 
 have added by death as well as by life to the lustre 
 of our history, must also have an interest in this day ; 
 that in their timeless habitations they remember us 
 beneath the lower circle of the heavens, are glad in 
 
Unseejt Spectators. 
 
 our joy, and share and lead our grateful praise. To a 
 spirit alive with the memories of the time, and rejoic- 
 ing- in its presage of nobler futures, recalling the great, 
 the beloved, the heroic, who have labored and joy- 
 fully died for its coming, it will not seem too fond an 
 enthusiasm to feel that the air is quick with shapes 
 we cannot see, and orlows with faces whose lieht 
 serene we may not catch ! They who counseled in 
 the Cabinet, they who defined and settled the law in 
 decisions of the Bench, they who pleaded with mighty 
 eloquence in the Senate, they who poured out their 
 souls in triumphant effusion for the liberty which they 
 loved in forum or pulpit, they who gave their young 
 and glorious life as an offering on the field, that gov- 
 ernment for the people, and by the people, might not 
 perish from the earth — it cannot be but that they too 
 have part and place in this Jubilee of our history ! 
 God make our doings not unworthy of such spec- 
 tators ! and make our spirit sympathetic Vv^ith theirs 
 irom whom all selfish passion and pride have nov/ 
 forever passed away ! 
 
 The interest which is felt so distinctly and widely 
 in this anniversary reflects a light on the greatness 
 of the action which it commemorates. It shows that 
 we do not unduly exaggerate the significance or the 
 importance of that ; that it had really large, even 
 world-wide relations, and contributed an eft'ective and 
 a valuable force to the furtherance of the cause of 
 freedom, education, humane institutions, and popular 
 
 II 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 advancement, wherever its influence has been felt. 
 Yet when we consider the action itself, it may easily 
 seem but slight in its nature, as it was certainly 
 commonplace in its circumstances. There was 
 nothing even picturesque in its surroundings, to 
 enlist for it the pencil of the painter, or help to fix 
 any luminous image of that which was done on 
 the popular memory. 
 
 In this respect it is singularly contrasted with other 
 great and kindred events in general history ; with 
 those heroic and fruitful actions in English history 
 which had especially prepared the way for it, and 
 with which the thoughtful student of the past will 
 always set it in intimate relations. Its utter simplicity, 
 as compared with their splendor, becomes impressive. 
 
 When, five centuries and a half before, on the 
 fifteenth of June, and the following days, in the year 
 of our Lord 12 15, the English barons met King John 
 in the long meadow of Runnemede, and forced from 
 him the Mao-na Charta — the stroncr foundation and 
 steadfast bulwark of English liberty, concerning 
 which Mr. Hallam has said in our own tim.e that " all 
 Avhich has been since obtained is little more than as 
 confirmation or commentary," — no circumstance was 
 wanting, of outward pageantry, to give dignity, 
 brilliance, impressiveness, to the scene. On the one 
 side was the King, with the Bishops and nobles who 
 attended him, with the Master of the Templars, and 
 the Papal legate before whom he had lately rendered 
 
Mas^na Chart a. 
 
 %b 
 
 his homage.* On the other side was the great and 
 determined majority of the barons of England, with 
 multitudes of knights, armed vassals, and retainers. t 
 With them in purpose, and in resolute zeal, were 
 most of those who attended the King. Stephen 
 Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the 
 English clergy, was with them ; the Bishops of Lon- 
 don, Winchester, Lincoln, Rochester, and of other 
 great sees. The Earl of Pembroke, dauntless and 
 wise, of vast and increasing power in the realm, and 
 not long after to be its Protector, was really at 
 their head. Robert Fitz- Walter, whose fair daughter 
 Matilda the profligate king had forcibly abducted, 
 was Marshal of the army — the " Army of God, and 
 the Holy Church." William Longsword, Earl of 
 Salisbury, half-brother of the King, was on the 
 field ; the Earls of Albemarle, Arundel, Gloucester, 
 Hereford, Norfolk, Oxford, the great Earl Warenne, 
 who claimed the same right of the sword in his barony 
 which William the Conqueror had had in the king- 
 dom, the Constable of Scotland, Hubert de Burgh, 
 
 * May 15, A.D. 1213. 
 
 t " Ouant a ceux qui se trouvaient du cote des barons, il n'est ni 
 necessaire ni possible de les enumerer, puisque toute la noblesse d'- 
 Angleterre reunie en un seul corps, ne pouvait tomber sous le calcul. 
 Lorsque les pretentions des revokes eurent ete debattues, le roi Jean, 
 co'nprenant son inferiorite vis-a-vis des forces de ses barons, accorda 
 sans resistance les lois et libertes qu'on lui demandait, et les confirma 
 par la charte." 
 
 Chronique de Matt. Paris, trad, par A. Huillard-Br '-holies. Tome 
 Troisieme, pp. 6, 7. 
 
 13 
 
Oration at Nezv Yo7^k. 
 
 seneschal of Poictou, and many other powerful 
 nobles, — descendants of the daring soldiers whose 
 martial valor had mastered England, Crusaders who 
 had followed Richard at Ascalon and at Jaffa, whose 
 own liberties had since been in mortal peril. Some 
 burgesses of London were present, as well ; trouba- 
 dours, minstrels, and heralds were not wanting ; and 
 doubtless there mingled with the throng those skillful 
 clerks whose pens had drawn the great instrument of 
 freedom, and whose training in language had given 
 a remarkable precision to its exact clauses and cogent 
 terms. 
 
 Pennons and banners streamed at large, and spear- 
 heads gleamed, above the host. The June sunshine 
 flashed reflected from inlaid shield and mascled 
 armor. The terrible quivers of English yeomen 
 hung on their shoulders. The voice of trumpets, and 
 clamoring bugles, w^as in the air. The whole scene 
 was vast as a battle, though bright as a tournament ; 
 splendid, but threatening, like burnished clouds, in 
 which lightnings sleep. The king, one of the hand- 
 somest men of the time, though cruelty, perfidy, and 
 every foul passion must have left their traces on his 
 face, was especially fond of magnificence in dress ;^ 
 wearing, we are told, on one Christmas occasion, a 
 rich mantle of red satin, embroidered with sapphires 
 and pearls, a tunic of white damask, a girdle lustrous 
 with precious stones, and a baldric from his shoulder, 
 
 crossing his breast, set with diamonds and emeralds, 
 14 
 
The Brilliant Panorama. 
 
 while even his gloves, as indeed is still indicated on 
 his fine effigy in Worcester cathedral, bore similar 
 ornaments, the one a ruby, the other a sapphire. 
 
 Whatever was superb, therefore, in that consum- 
 mate age of royal and baronial state, whatever was 
 splendid in the glittering and grand apparatus of 
 chivalry, whatever was impressive in the almost more 
 than princely pomp of prelates of the Church, — 
 
 The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, 
 And all that beauty, all that wealth can give, — 
 
 all this was marshalled on that historic plain in 
 
 Surrey, where John and the barons faced each other, 
 
 where Saxon king and Saxon earl had met in council 
 
 before the Norman had footing in England ; and all 
 
 combined to give a fit magnificence of setting to the 
 
 great charter there granted and sealed. 
 
 The tower of Windsor — not of the present castle 
 
 and palace, but of the earlier detached fortress wdiich 
 
 already crowned the cliff, and from which John 
 
 had come to the field — looked down on the scene. 
 
 On the one side, low hills enclosed the meadow ; 
 
 on the other, the Thames flowed brightly by, seeking 
 
 the capital and the sea. Every feature of the scene 
 
 was English, save one ; but over all loomed, in 
 
 a portentous and haughty stillness, In the ominous 
 
 presence of the envoy from Rome, that ubiquitous 
 
 power, surpassing all others, which already had once 
 
 laid the kingdom under interdict, and had exiled John 
 
 from church and throne, but to which later he had 
 
 15 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 been reconciled, and on which now he secretly relied 
 to annul the charter which he was granting. 
 
 The brilliant panorama illuminates the page which 
 bears its story. It rises still as a vision before one, 
 as he looks on the venerable parchment originals, 
 preserved to our day in the British Museum. If it be 
 true, as Hallam has said, that from that era a new soul 
 was infused into the people of England, it must be 
 confessed that the place, the day, and all the circum- 
 stances of that nevv^ birth were httinof to the g-reat 
 and the vital event. 
 
 That age passed away, and its peculiar splendor of 
 aspect was not thereafter to be repeated. Yet when, 
 four hundred years later, on the seventh of June,* 
 1628, the Petition of Right, the second great charter 
 of the liberties of England, was presented by Parlia- 
 ment to Charles the First, the scene and its accesso- 
 ries were hardly less impressive. 
 
 * Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles I., 1628-9. 
 
 Rushworth's Hist. Coll. Charles I , p. C25. 
 
 It is rather remarkable that neither Hume, Clarendon, Hallam, De 
 Lolme, nor Macaulay, mentions this date, though all recognize the capi- 
 tal importance of the event. It does not appear in even Knight's Popu- 
 lar History of England. Miss Aikin, in her Memoirs of the Court of 
 Charles I., gives it as June 8, (Vol. I, p. 216) ; and Chambers' Encyclo- 
 paedia, which ought to be careful and accurate in regard to the dates of 
 events in English history, says, under the title ' Petition of Rights :' " At 
 length, on both Houses of Parliament insisting on a fuller answer, he 
 pronounced an unqualified assent in the usual form of words, ' Soit fait 
 comme il est desire,' on the 26th of June, 1628." The same statement 
 is repeated in the latest Revised Edition of that Encyclopjedia. Lingard 
 
 gives the date correctly. 
 16 
 
The Petition of Right. 
 
 Into that law — called a Petition, as if to mask the 
 deadly energy of its blow upon tyranny — had been 
 collected by the skill of its framers all the heads of 
 the despotic prerogative which Charles had exer- 
 cised, that they might all be smitten together, with 
 one tremendous destroying stroke. The king, en- 
 throned in his chair of state, looked forth on those 
 who waited for his word, as still he looks, with his 
 fore-casting and melancholy face, from the canvas of 
 Van Dyck. Before him were assembled the nobles 
 of England, in peaceful array, and not in armor, but 
 with a civil power in their hands which the older 
 gauntlets could not have held, and with the mem- 
 ories of a lonof renown almost as visible to them- 
 selves and to the king as were the tapestries sus- 
 pended on the walls. 
 
 Crowding the bar, behind these descendants of the 
 earlier barons, were the members of the House of 
 Commons, with whom the lav/ now presented to the 
 king had had its origin, and whose boldness and tena- 
 city had constrained the peers, after vain endeavor to 
 modify its provisions, to accept them as they stood. 
 They were the most powerful body of representatives 
 of the kingdom that had yet been convened ; pos- 
 sessing a private wealth, it was estimated, surpassing 
 three-fold that of the Peers, and representing not 
 less than they the best life, and the oldest lineage, of 
 the kingdom which they loved. 
 
 Their dexterous, dauntless, and far-sighted sagacity 
 
 17 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 is yet more evident as we look back than their wealth 
 or their breeding-; and amonof them were men whose 
 names will be familiar while England continues. 
 Wentworth was there, soon to be the most danger- 
 ous of traitors to the cause of which he was then the 
 champion, but who then appeared as resolute as ever 
 to vindicate the ancient, lawful, and vital liberties of 
 the kingdom ; and Pym was there, the unsurpassed 
 statesman, who, not long afterward was to warn the 
 dark and haughty apostate that he never again would 
 leave pursuit of him so long as his head stood on his 
 shoulders.* Hampden was there, considerate and 
 serene, but inflexible as an oak ; once imprisoned 
 already for his resistance to an unjust taxation, and 
 ready again to suffer and to conquer in the same 
 supreme cause. Sir John Eliot was there, eloquent 
 and devoted, who had tasted also the bitterness of 
 imprisonment, and who, after years of its subsequent 
 experience, was to die a martyr in the Tower. Coke 
 was there, seventy-seven years of age, but full of fire 
 as full of fame, whose vehement and unswerving 
 hand had had chief part in framing the Petition. 
 Selden was there, the repute of whose learning was 
 already continental. Sir Fra,ncis Seymour, Sir Rob- 
 ert Philips, Strode, Hobart, Denzil Holies, and Val- 
 entine — such were the commoners ; and there, at 
 the outset of a career not imagined by either, faced 
 the king a silent young member who had come nov/ 
 
 * Welwood's Memorials, quoted in Forster's Life of Pym, p. 62. 
 18 
 
The Seventh of June, 1628. 
 
 to his first Parliament, at the age of twenty-nine, 
 from the borough of Huntingdon, Oliver Cromwell. 
 
 In a plain cloth suit he probably stood among his 
 colleagues. But they were often splendid, and even 
 sumptuous, in dress; with slashed doublets, and 
 cloaks of velvet, with flowing collars of rich lace, the 
 swords by their sides, in embroidered belts, with 
 flashing hilts, their very hats jeweled and plumed, 
 the abundant dressed and perfumed hair falling in 
 curls upon their shoulders. Here and there may 
 have been those who still more distinctly symbol- 
 ized their spirit, with steel corslets, overlaid with 
 lace and rich embroidery. 
 
 So stood they in the presence, representing to the 
 full the wealth, and genius, and stately civic pomp of 
 Eno-land, until the king had pronounced his assent, 
 in the express customary form, to the law which con- 
 firmed the popular liberties ; and when, on hearing 
 his unequivocal final assent, they burst into loud, 
 even passionate acclamations of victorious joy, there 
 had been from the first no scene more impressive in 
 that venerable Hall, whose history went back to Ed- 
 w-ard the Confessor. 
 
 In what sharp contrast with the rich ceremonial and 
 the splendid accessories of these preceding kindred 
 events, appears that modest scene at Philadelphia, 
 from which we gratefully date to-day a hundred years 
 of constant and prosperous national life ! 
 
 In a plain room, of an unpretending and recent 
 
 i9 
 
Oration at New Yoi'k. 
 
 buildine — the lower east room of what then was a 
 State-house, what since has been known as the " In- 
 dependence Hall " — in the midst of a city of perhaps 
 thirty thousand inhabitants — a city which preserved 
 its rural aspect, and the quaint simplicity of whose 
 plan and structures had always been marked among 
 American towns — were assembled probably less 
 than fifty persons to consider a paper prepared by a 
 young Virginia lawyer, giving reasons for a Resolve 
 which the assembly had adopted two days before. 
 They v/ere farmers, planters, lawyers, physicians, sur- 
 veyors of land, with one eminent Presbyterian clergy- 
 man. A majority of them had been educated at such 
 schools, or primitive colleges, as then existed on this 
 continent, while a few had enjoyed the rare advantage 
 of training abroad, and foreign travel ; but a consider- 
 able number, and among them some of tlie most 
 influential, had had no other education than that which 
 they had gained by diligent reading while at their 
 trades or on their farms. 
 
 The figure to which our thoughts turn first is that 
 of the author of the careful paper on .the details of 
 which the discussion turned. It has no special maj- 
 esty or charm, the slight tall frame, the sun-burned 
 face, the gray eyes spotted with hazel, the red hair 
 which crowns the head ; but already, at the age ot 
 thirty-three, the man has impressed himself on his 
 associates as a m.aster of principles, and of the lan- 
 guage in which those principles find expression. 
 
The Cojitincntal Congress. 
 
 so that his colleagues have left to him, almost wholly, 
 the work of preparing the important Declaration. 
 He wants readiness in debate, and so is now silent ; 
 but he listens eagerly to the vigorous argument and 
 the forcible appeals of one of his fellows on the com- 
 mittee, Mr. John Adams, and now and then speaks 
 with another of the committee, much older than 
 himself — a stout man, with a friendly face, in a plain 
 dress, whom the world already had heard something 
 of as Benjamin Franklin. These three are perhaps 
 most prominently before us as we recall the vanished 
 scene, though others were there of fine presence and 
 cultivated manners, and though all impress us as 
 substantial and respectable representative men, how- 
 ever harsh the features of some, however brawny 
 their hands v/ith labor. But certainly nothing could 
 be more unpretending, more destitute of pictorial 
 charm than that small assembly of persons for the 
 most part quite unknown to previous fame, and half 
 of whose names it is not probable that half of us in 
 this assembly could now repeat. 
 
 After a discussion somewhat prolonged, as it 
 seemed at the time, especially as it had been con- 
 tinued from previous days, and after some minor 
 amendments of the paper, toward evening it was 
 adopted^ and ordered to be sent to the several 
 States, signed by the president and the secretary ; 
 and the simple transaction was complete. Whatever 
 there may have been of proclamation and bell-ringing 
 
Oration at Nau York. 
 
 appears to have come on subsequent days. It was 
 almost a full month before the paper was en- 
 grossed, and signed by the members. It must have 
 been nearly or quite the same time before the news 
 of its adoption had reached the remoter parts of the 
 land. 
 
 If pomp of circumstances were necessary to make 
 an event like this great and memorable, there would 
 have been others in our own history more worthy far 
 of our commemoration. As matched against multi- 
 tudes in general history, it would sink into instant 
 and complete insignificance. Yet here, to-day, a 
 hundred years from the adoption of that paper, in 
 a city wdiich counts its languages by scores, and beats 
 with the tread of a million feet, in a country whose 
 enterprise flies abroad over sea and land on the rush 
 of engines not then imagined, in a time so full of 
 excitino- hopes that it hardly has leisure to contem- 
 plate the past, we pause from all our toil and traffic, 
 our eager plans and impetuous debate, to commemo- 
 rate the event. The whole land pauses, as I have 
 said ; and some distinct impression of it will follow 
 the sun, wherever he climbs the steep of Heaven, 
 until in all countries it has more or less touched the 
 thoughts of men. 
 
 Why is this ? is a question, the answer to which 
 should interpret and vindicate our assemblage. 
 
 It is not simply because a century happens to have 
 passed since the event thus remembered occurred. 
 
The Declaration an Act of the People. 
 
 A hundred years are always closing' from some event, 
 and have been since Adam M^as in his prime. There 
 was, of course, some special importance in the action 
 then accomplished — in the nature of that action, 
 since not in its circumstances — to justify such long 
 record of it ; and that importance it is ours to define. 
 In the perspective of distance the small things dis- 
 appear, while the great and eminent keep their place. 
 As Carlyle has said: "A king in the midst of his 
 body-guards, with his trumpets, war-horses, and gilt 
 standard-bearers, will look great though he be little ; 
 only some Roman Carus can give audience to satrap 
 ambassadors, while seated on the ground, with a 
 woollen cap, and supping on boiled pease, like a 
 common soldier."* 
 
 What was, then, the great reality of power in what 
 was done a hundred years since, which gives it its 
 masterful place in history — makes it Roman and 
 regal amid all its simplicity ?. 
 
 Of course, as the prime element of its power, it 
 was the action of a People and not merely of per- 
 sons ; and such action of a People has always a 
 momentum, a public force, a historic significance, 
 which can pertain to no individual arguments and 
 appeals. There are times, indeed, when it has the 
 energy and authority in it of a secular inspiration ; 
 when the supreme soul which rules the world comes 
 through it to utterance, and a thought surpassing 
 
 * Essay on Schiller. Essays: Vol. II., p. 301. 
 
Oraiioii at New York. 
 
 man's wisest plan, a will transcending his strongest 
 purpose, Is heard in its commanding voice. 
 
 It does not seem extravagant to say that the time 
 to which our thoughts are turned was one of these. 
 
 For a century and a half the emigrants from Eu- 
 rope had brought hither, not the letters alone, the 
 arts and industries, or the religious convictions, but 
 the hardy moral and political life, which had there 
 been developed in ages of strenuous struggle and 
 work. France and Germany, Holland and Sweden, 
 as well as England, Scotland, and Ireland, had con- 
 tributed to this. The Austrian Tyrol, the Bavarian 
 highlands, the Bohemian plain, Denmark, even Por- 
 tugal, had had their part in this colonization. The 
 ample domain which here received the earnest im- 
 migrants had imparted to them of its own oneness ; 
 and diversities of language, race, and custom, had 
 fast disappeared in the governing unity of a com- 
 mon aspiration, and a common purpose to work out 
 throuorh freedom a nobler well-beingf. 
 
 The general moral life of this people, so various 
 in origin, so accordant In spirit, had only risen to 
 grander force through the toil and strife, the austere 
 training, the long patience of endurance, to which it 
 here had been subjected. The exposures to heat, 
 and cold, and famine, to unaccustomed labors, to al- 
 ternations of climate unknown In the old world, to 
 malarial forces brooding above the mellow and drain- 
 less recent lands, — these had fatally stricken many ; 
 24 
 
Unity of the Colonies. 
 
 but those who survived were tough and robust, the 
 more so, perhaps, because of the perils which they 
 had surmounted. Education was not easy, books 
 were not many, and the daily newspaper was un- 
 known ; but political discussion had been always 
 going on, and men's minds had gathered unconscious 
 force as they strove with each other, in eager de- 
 bate, on questions concerning the common welfare. 
 They had had much experience in subordinate legis- 
 lation, on the local matters belonging to their care ; 
 had acquired dexterity in performing public business, 
 and had often had to resist or amend the suggestions 
 or dictates of Royal governors. For a recent people, 
 dwelling apart from older and conflicting states, they 
 had had a large experience in war, the crack of the 
 rifle being never unfamiliar along the near frontier, 
 where disciplined skill was often combined with sav- 
 age fury to sweep with sword or scar with fire their 
 scattered Settlements. 
 
 By every species, therefore, of common work, of 
 discussion, endurance, and martial struggle, the de- 
 scendants of the colonists scattered along the Ameri- 
 can coast had been allied to each other. They were 
 more closely allied than they knew. It needed only 
 some signal occasion, some summons to a sudden 
 heroic decision, to bring them into instant general 
 combination ; and Huguenot and Hollander, Swede, 
 German, and Protestant Portuguese, as well as Eng- 
 lishman, Scotchm.an, Irishman, would then forget 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 that their ancestors had been different, in the su- 
 preme consciousness that now they had a common 
 country, and before all else were all of them Ameri- 
 cans. 
 
 That time had come. That consciousness had for 
 fifteen years been quickening in the people, since the 
 "Writs of Assistance" had been applied for and 
 granted, in 1761, when Otis, resigning his honorable 
 position under the crown, had flung himself against 
 the alarming innovation with an eloquence as blast- 
 ing as the stroke of the lightning which in the end 
 destroyed his life. - With every fresh invasion by 
 England of their popular liberties, with every act 
 which threatened such invasion by providing oppor- 
 tunity and the instruments for it, the sense of a com- 
 mon privilege and right, of a common inheritance in 
 the country they were fashioning out of the forest, of 
 a common place in the history of the world, had 
 been increased among the colonists. They were 
 plain people, with no strong tendencies to the ideal. 
 They wanted only a chance for free growth ; but 
 they must have that, and have it together, though 
 the continent cracked. The diamond is formed, it 
 has sometimes been supposed, under a swift enor- 
 mous pressure, of masses meeting, and forcing the 
 carbon into a crystal. The ultimate spirit of the 
 American colonists was formed in like manner ; the 
 weight of a rocky continent beneath, the weight of 
 an oppression only intolerable because undefined 
 
 z6 
 
A<rreemcnl in the Declaration. 
 
 pressing on it from above. But now that spirit, of 
 inestimable price, reflecting light from every angle, 
 and harder to be broken than anything material, was 
 suddenly shown in acts and declarations of conven- 
 tions and assemblies from the Penobscot to the St. 
 Mary's. 
 
 Any commanding public temper, once established 
 in a people, grows bolder, of course, more inquisitive 
 and inventive, more sensible of its rights, more de- 
 termined on its future, as it comes more frequently 
 into exercise. This in the colonies lately had had 
 the most significant of all its expressions, up to that 
 point, in the resolves of popular assemblies that the 
 time had come for a final separation from the king- 
 dom of Great Britain. The eminent Congress of 
 two years before had given it powerful reinforcement. 
 Now, at last, it entered the representative American 
 assembly, and claimed from that the ultimate word. 
 It found what it sought. The Declaration was only 
 the voice of that supreme, impersonal force, that will 
 of communities, that universal soul of the State. 
 
 The vote of the colony then thinly covering a part 
 of the spaces not yet wholly occupied by this great 
 State, was not, indeed, at once formally given for 
 such an instrument. It was wisely delayed, under 
 the judicious counsel of Jay, till a provincial Congress 
 could assemble, specially called, and formally author- 
 ized, to pronounce the deliberate resolve of the 
 colony ; and so it happened that only twelve colonies 
 
I 
 
 Oration at New York. 
 
 voted at first for the great Declaration, and that 
 New York was not joined to the nurhber till five 
 days later. But Jay knew, and all knew, that numer- 
 ous, wealthy, eminent in character, high in position 
 as were those here and elsewhere in the country — in 
 Massachusetts, in Virginia, and in the Carolinas — who 
 were by no means yet prepared to sever their con- 
 nection with Great Britain, the general and governing 
 mind of the people was fixed upon this, with a de- 
 cision which nothing could change, with a tenacity 
 which nothincr could break. The forces tendino- to 
 that result had wrought to their development with a 
 steadiness and strensfth which the stubbornest resist- 
 ance had hardly delayed. The spirit v/hich now 
 shook light and impulse over the land was recent in 
 its precise demand, but as old in its birth as the first 
 Christian settlements ; and it was that spirit — not of 
 one, nor of fifty, not of all the individuals in all the 
 conventions, but the vaster spirit which lay behind — 
 which put itself on sudden record through the prompt 
 and accurate pen of Jefferson. 
 
 He was himself in full sympathy with it, and only 
 by reason of that sympathy could give it such con- 
 summate expression. Not out of books, legal re- 
 searches, historical inquiry, the careful and various 
 studies of language^ came that document ; but out 
 of repeated public debate, out of manifold personal 
 and private discussion, out of his clear sympathetic 
 observation of the changing feeling and thought of 
 
Public Sentiment Declared. 
 
 men, out of that exquisite personal sensibility to 
 vague and impalpable popular impulses which was in 
 him innately combined with artistic taste, an ideal 
 nature, and rare power of philosophical thought. 
 The voice of the cottage as well as the college, of 
 the church as well as the legislative assembly, w^as 
 in the paper. It echoed the talk of the farmer in 
 home-spun, as well as the classic eloquence of Lee, 
 or the terrible tones of Patrick Henr)^ It gushed at 
 last from the pen of Its writer, like the fountain from 
 the roots of Lebanon, a brimming river when it issues 
 from the rock ; but it was because its sources had 
 been supplied, its fullness filled, by unseen springs ; 
 by the rivulets winding far up among the cedars, and 
 percolating through hidden crevices in the stone ; by 
 melting snows, whose white sparkle seemed still on 
 the stream ; by fierce rains, with which the basins 
 above were drenched ; by even the clews, silent 
 and wide, which had lain in stillness all night upon 
 the hill. 
 
 The Platonic idea of the development of the State 
 was thus realized here ; first Ethics, then Politics. 
 A public opinion, energetic and dominant, took its 
 place from the start as the chief Instrument of the 
 new civilization. No dashing manoeuvre of skillful 
 commanders, no sudden burst of popular passion, 
 was in the Declaration ; but the vast mystery of a 
 supreme and Imperative public life, at once diffused 
 and intense — behind all persons, before all plans, 
 
Oratio7i at Nezu York. 
 
 beneath which individual wills are exalted, at whose 
 touch the personal mind is inspired, and under whose 
 transcendent impulse the smallest instrument becomes 
 of a terrific force. That made the Declaration ; and 
 that makes it now, in its modest brevity, take its 
 place with Magna Charta and the Petition of Right, 
 as full as they of vital force, and destined to a parallel 
 permanence. 
 
 Because this intense common life of a determined 
 and manifold People has not behind them, other 
 documents, in form similar to this, and in polish and 
 cadence of balanced phrase perhaps its superiors, 
 have had no hold like that which it keeps on the 
 memory of men. What papers have challenged the 
 attention of mankind within the century, in the 
 stately Spanish tongue, in Mexico, New Granada, 
 Venezuela, Bolivia, or the Argentine Republic, which 
 the world at large has now quite forgotten ! How the 
 resonant proclamations of German or of French 
 Republicans, of Hungarian or Spanish revolutionists 
 and patriots, have vanished as sound absorbed in 
 the air ! Eloquent, persuasive, just, as they were, 
 with a vigor of thought, a fervor of passion, a fine 
 completeness and symmetry of expression, in which 
 they could hardly be surpassed, they have now only 
 a literary value. They never became great general 
 forces. They were weak, because they were per- 
 sonal ; and history is too crowded, civilization is too 
 
 vast, to take much impression from occasional docu- 
 30 
 
The Declaration Gld in its Life. 
 
 ments. Only then is a paper of secular force, or long- 
 remembered, when behind it is the ubiquitous energy 
 of the popular will, rolling through its words in vast 
 diapason, and charging its clauses with tones of 
 thunder. 
 
 Because such an energy was behind it, our Decla- 
 ration had its majestic place and meaning ; and they 
 who adopted it saw nowhere else 
 
 So rich advantage of a promised glory, 
 
 As smiled upon the forehead of their action. 
 
 Because of that, we read it still, and look to have it 
 as audible as now, among the dissonant voices of the 
 world, when other generations, in long succession, 
 have come and gone ! 
 
 But further, too, it must be observed that this 
 
 paper, adopted a hundred years since, was not 
 merely the declaration of a People, as distinguished 
 from eminent and cultured individuals — a confession 
 before the world of the public State-faith, rather 
 than a political thesis — but it was also the declara- 
 tion of a People which claimed for its ovvMI a great 
 inheritance of equitable laws, and of practical liberty, 
 and Y/hich now was intent to enlarge and enrich 
 that. It had ro'ots in the past, and a long gene- 
 alogy ; and so it had a vitality inherent, and an im- 
 mense energy. 
 
 They who framed It went back, Indeed, to first 
 
 principles. There was something philosophic and 
 
 31 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 ideal in their scheme, as always there is when the 
 general mind is deeply stirred. It was not superfi- 
 cial. Yet they were not undertaking to establish 
 new theories, or to build their state upon artificial 
 plans and abstract speculations. They were simply 
 evolving out of the past what therein had been 
 latent; were liberating into free exhibition and un- 
 ceasing activity a vital force older than the history of 
 their colonization, and wide as the lands from which 
 they came. They had the sweep of vast impulses 
 behind them. The slow tendencies of centuries 
 came to sudden consummation in their Declaration ; 
 and the force of its impact upon the affairs and the 
 mind of the world was not to be measured by its 
 contents alone, but by the relation in which these 
 stood to all the vehement discussion and struggle of 
 which it was the latest outcome. 
 
 This ought to be, always, distinctly observed. 
 
 The tendency is strong, and has been general, 
 among those who have introduced great changes in 
 the government of states, to follow some plan of po- 
 litical, perhaps of social innovation, which enlists 
 their judgment, excites their fancy, and to make a 
 comely theoretic habitation for the national house- 
 hold, rather than to build on the old foundations, — • 
 expanding the walls, lifting the height, enlarging the 
 doorways, enlightening with new windows the halls, 
 but still keeping the strength and renewing the age 
 of an old familiar and venerated structure. You re- 
 
The Weakness of Thcorclical Changes. 
 
 member how in France, in 17S9, and the following 
 years, the schemes of those whom Napoleon called 
 the " ideologists " succeeded each other, no one of 
 them gaining a permanent supremacy, though each 
 included important elements, till the armed consulate 
 of 1799 swept them all into the air, and put in place 
 of them one masterful genius and ambitious will. 
 You remember how in Spain, in 1S12, the new Con- 
 stitution proclaimed by the Cortes was thought to in- 
 augurate with beneficent provisions a wholly new era 
 of development and progress ; yet how the history 
 of the splendid peninsula, from that day to this, has 
 been but the record of a struggle to the death be- 
 tween the Old and the New, the contest as desper- 
 ate, it would seem, in our time as it w^as at the first. 
 
 It must be so, always, when a preceding state of 
 society and government, which has got itself estab- 
 lished through many generations, is suddenly super- 
 seded by a different fabric, however more evidently 
 conformed to right reason. The principle is not so 
 strong as the prejudice. Habit masters invention. 
 The new and theoretic shivers its force on the obsti- 
 nate coherence of the old and the established. The 
 modern structure fails and is replaced, while the grim 
 feudal keep, though scarred and weather-worn, the 
 very cement seeming gone from its walls, still scowls 
 defiance at the red right-hand of the lightning itself. 
 It was no such rash speculative change which here 
 
 was attempted. The People whose deputies framed 
 
 33 
 
Oration at Nczv York. 
 
 our Declaration were largely themselves descendants 
 of Englishmen ; and those who were not, had lived 
 long enough under English institutions to be im- 
 pressed with their tendency and spirit. It was there- 
 fore only natural that even when adopting that 
 ultimate measure which severed them from the 
 British crown, they should retain all that had been 
 gained in the mother-land through centuries of 
 endurance and strife. They left nothing that was 
 good ; they abolished the bad, added the needful, 
 and developed into a rule for the continent the splen- 
 did precedents of great former occasions. They 
 shared still the boast of Englishmen that their con- 
 stitution "has no single date from which its duration 
 is to be reckoned," and that " the origin of the 
 English law is as undiscoverable as that of the Nile." 
 They went back themselves, for the origin of their 
 liberties, to the most ancient muniments of English 
 freedom. Jefferson had affirmed, in 1774, that a 
 primitive charter of American Independence lay in 
 the fact that as the Saxons had left their native wilds 
 in the North of Europe, and had occupied Britain — 
 the country which they left asserting over them 
 no further control, nor any dependence of them upon 
 it — so the Englishmen coming hither had formed, by 
 that act, another state, over which Parliament had no 
 rights, in which its laws were void till accepted.* 
 
 But while seeking for their liberties so archaic a 
 basis, neither he nor his colleagues were in the least 
 
 34 * Works, Vol I. p. 125. A 
 
Loyally of Ike Colonies lo EiiglisJi Precedents. 
 
 careless of what subsequent times had done to com- 
 plete them. There was not one element of popular 
 right, which had been wrested from crown and noble 
 in any age, which they did not keep ; not an equitable 
 rule, for the transfer or the division of property, for 
 the protection of personal rights, or for the detection 
 and punishment of crime, which was not precious in 
 their eyes. Even Chancery jurisdiction they v/idely 
 retained, with the distinct tribunals, derived from the 
 ecclesiastical courts, for probate of wills ; and English 
 technicalities were maintained in their courts, almost 
 as if they were sacred things. Especially that 
 equality of civil rights among all commoners, which 
 Hallam declares the most prominent characteristic of 
 the English Constitution — the source of its per- 
 manence, its Improvement, and Its vigor — they per- 
 fectly preserved ; they only more sharply affirmatively 
 declared It. Indeed, In renouncing their allegiance 
 to the king, and putting the United Colonies in his 
 place, they felt themselves acting In Intimate harmony 
 with the spirit and drift of the ancient constitution. 
 The Executive here was to be elective, not heredi- 
 tary, to be limited and not permanent In the term of 
 his functions ; and no established peerage should 
 exist. But each State retained its governor. Its 
 legislature, generally in two houses, its ancient 
 statute and common law ; and if they had been chal- 
 lenged for English authority for their attitude toward 
 the crown, they might have replied In the words of 
 
 35 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 Bracton, the Lord Chief-Justice five hundred years 
 before, under the reign of Henry the Third, that " the 
 law makes the king; " "there is no king, where will, 
 and not law, bears rule ; " "if the king were without 
 a bridle, that is the law, they ought to put a bridle 
 upon him." * They might have replied in the words 
 of Fox, speaking in Parliament, in daring defiance of 
 the temper of the House, but with many supporting 
 him, when he said that in declaring Independence, 
 they "had done no more than the English had done 
 against James the Second." f 
 
 * Ipse autem rex, non debet esse sub hoinine, sed sub Deo et sub 
 Lege, quia Lex facit regem. Attribuat igitur rex Legi quod Lex attribuit 
 ei, videlicet dominationem et potestatem, non est enim rex ubi domi- 
 natur voluntas et non Lex. De Leg. et Cons. Angliae ; Lib. L, cap 
 8. P. 5. 
 
 Rex autem habet superiorem, Deum. Item, Legem, per quam factus 
 est rex. Item, curiam suam, videlicet comites, Barones, quia comites 
 dicuntur quasi socii regis, et qui habet socium habet magistrum ; et ideo 
 si rex fuerit sine fraeno, i. e. sine Lege, debent ei fraenum ponere ; etc. 
 Lib. II., cap. 16, P. 3. 
 
 The following is still more explicit : '' As the head of a body 
 natural cannot change its nerves and sinews, cannot deny to the several 
 parts their proper energ\^ their due proportion and aliment of blood ; 
 neither can a King, who is the head of a body politic, change the laws 
 thereof, nor take from the people what is theirs by right, against their 
 consent. * * For he is appointed to protect his subjects in their 
 lives, properties, and laws ; for this very end and purpose he has the 
 delegation of power from the people, and he has no just claim to any 
 other power but this." Sir John Fortescue's Treatise, De Laudibus 
 Legum Angliae, c. 9, [about A. D. 1470,] quoted by Hallam, Mid. Ages, 
 chap. VIII., part III. 
 
 t Speech of October 31, 1776: " The House divided on the Amend- 
 ment. Yeas, 87 ; nays, 242." 
 36 
 
Riders, Properly Representatives of the People. 
 
 They had done no more ; though they had not 
 elected another khig in place of him whom they re- 
 nounced. They had taken no step so far in advance 
 of the then existing English Constitution as those 
 which the Parhament of 1640 took in advance of 
 the previous Parham.ents which Charles had dis- 
 solved. If there was a right more rooted than an- 
 other in that Constitution, it was the right of the 
 people which was taxed to have its vote in the tax- 
 ino- leo-islature. If there was anything more accord- 
 ant than another with its historic temper and tenor, 
 it was that the authority of the king was determined 
 when his rule became tyrannous. Jefferson had but 
 perfectly expressed the doctrine of the lovers of free- 
 dom in England for many generations, when he said 
 in his Summary view of the Rights of America, in 
 1774, that "the monarch is no more than the chief 
 officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and cir- 
 cumscribed with definite powers, to assist in work- 
 ing the great machine of government, erected for 
 their use, and consequently subject to their superin- 
 tendence ; " that "kings are the servants, not the 
 proprietors of the people ; " and that a nation claims 
 its rights, "as derived from the laws of nature, not 
 as the gift of their chief magistrate."* 
 
 * Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees, for the peo- 
 ple and if the cause, the interest and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or 
 wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority 
 that they themselves have deputed, and to constitute abler and better 
 agents, attorneys, and tr.stees.-JOHN ADAMS. Dissertation on Canon 
 and Feudal Law ; 1765. Works : Vol. III., pp. 456-7- 37 
 
Oration at Nezo York. 
 
 That had been the spirit, if not as yet the formu- 
 lated doctrine, of Raleigh, Hampden, Russell, Syd- 
 ney—of all the great leaders of liberty in England. 
 Milton had declared it, in a prose as majestic as any 
 passage of the Paradise Lost. The Commonwealth 
 had been built on it ; and the whole Revolution of 
 1688. And they who now framed it into their per- 
 manent organic law, and made it supreme in the 
 country they were shaping, were In harmony with the 
 noblest inspirations of the past. They were not in- 
 novating with a rash recklessness. They were sim- 
 ply accepting and re-afhrming what they had learned 
 from luminous events and illustrious men. So their 
 work had a dignity, a strength, and a permanence 
 which can never belong to mere fresh speculation. 
 It interlocked with that of multitudes going before. 
 It derived a virtue from every field of struggle in 
 England ; from every scaffold, hallowed by free and 
 consecrated blood ; from every hour of great debate. 
 It was only the complete development into law, for a 
 separated people, of that august ancestral liberty, the 
 germs of which had preceded the Heptarchy, the grad- 
 ual definition and establishment of which had been 
 the glory of English history. A thousand years 
 brooded over the room where they asserted heredi- 
 tary rights. Its walls showed neither portraits nor 
 mottoes ; but the Kaiser-saal at Frankfurt was not 
 hung around with such recollections. No titles were 
 
 worn by those plain men ; but there had not been 
 33 
 
English Liberty, ike Parent of Onrs. 
 
 one knightly soldier, or one patriotic and prescient 
 statesman, standing for liberty in the splendid centu- 
 turies of its English growth, who did not touch them 
 Avith unseen accolade, and bid them be faithful. The 
 paper which they adopted, fresh from the pen of its 
 young author, and written on his hired pine table, 
 was already, in essential life, of a venerable age ; and 
 it took immense impulse, it derived an instant and 
 vast authority, from its relation to that undying past 
 in which they too had grand inheritance, and from 
 which their public life had come. 
 
 Englishmen themselves now recognize this, and 
 often are proud of it. The distinguished represent- 
 ative of Great Britain at Washington may think his 
 government, as no doubt he does, superior to ours ; 
 but his clear eye cannot fail to see that English lib- 
 erty was the parent of ours, and that the new and 
 broader continent here opened before it, suggested 
 that expansion of it which we celebrate to-day. His 
 ancestors, like ours, helped to build the Republic ; 
 and its faithfulness to the past, amid all reformations, 
 was one great secret of its earliest triumph, has 
 been one source, from that day to this, of its endur- 
 ing and prosperous strength. 
 
 The Congress, and the People behind it, asserted 
 for themselves hereditary liberties, and hazarded 
 everything in the purpose to complete them. But 
 they also affirmed, with emphasis and effect, another 
 right, more general than this, which made their action 
 
 39 
 
Oration at Nczv York. 
 
 significant and important to other peoples, which 
 made it, indeed, a signal to the nations of the right 
 of each to assert for itself the just prerogative of 
 forming its government, electing its rulers, ordain- 
 ing its laws, as might to it seem most expedient. 
 Hear again the immortal words : " We hold these 
 truths to be self-evident ; * * that to secure these 
 [unalienable] rights, governments are instituted 
 among men, deriving their just powers from the con- 
 sent of the governed ; that whenever any form of 
 ofovernment becomes destructive of these ends, it is 
 the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to 
 institute new government, laying its foundations in 
 such principles, and organizing its powers in such 
 form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their 
 safety and happiness." 
 
 This is what the party of Bentham called ''the as- 
 sumption of natural rights, claimed without the 
 shghtest evidence of their existence, and supported 
 by vague and declamatory generalities." This is 
 what we receive as the decisive and noble declara- 
 tion, spoken with the simplicity of a perfect convic- 
 tion, of a natural right as patent as the continent ; a 
 declaration which challenged at once the attention of 
 mankind, and which is now practically assumed as a 
 premise in international relations and public law. 
 
 Of course it was not a new discovery. It was old 
 as the earliest of political philosophers ; as old, in- 
 deed, as the earliest communities, which, becoming 
 40 
 
The Dutch Republic, Exceptional in Europe. 
 
 established in particular locations, had there devel- 
 oped their own institutions, and repelled with ve- 
 hemence the assaults that would change them. But 
 in the growth of political societies, and the vast 
 expansion of imperial states, by the conquest of 
 those adjacent and weaker, this right, so easily rec- 
 ognized at the outset, so germane to the instincts, 
 so level with the reason, of every community, had 
 widely passed out of men's thoughts ; and the 
 power of a conquering state to change the institu- 
 tions and laws of a people, or impose on it new 
 ones, — the power of a parent state to shape the 
 forms and prescribe the rules of the colonies which 
 went from it, — had been so long and abundantly 
 exercised, that the very right of the people, thus con- 
 quered or colonial, to consult its own interests in the 
 frame of its government, had been almost forgotten. 
 It might be a high speculation of scholars, or a 
 charming dream of political enthusiasts. But it w^as 
 not a maxim for the practical statesman ; and what- 
 ever its correctness as an ideal principle, it was vain 
 to expect to see it established in a world full of 
 kings who claimed, each for himself, an authority from 
 God, and full of states intent on grasping and gov- 
 erning by their law adjacent domains. The revolt 
 of the Netherlands against Spanish domination had 
 been the one instance in modern history in which 
 the inherent right of a People to suit itself in the 
 
 frame of its government had been proclaimed, and 
 
 41 
 
I 
 
 Oration at New York. 
 
 then maintained ; and that had been at the outset a 
 paroxysmal revolt, against tyranny so crushing, and 
 cruelties so savage, that they took it out of the line 
 of examples. The Dutch Republic was almost as 
 exceptional, through the fierce wickedness which had 
 crowded it into being, as was Switzerland itself, on 
 its Alpine heights. For an ordinary state to claim 
 self-regulation, and found its government on a Ple- 
 biscit, v/as to contradict precedent, and to set at 
 defiance European tradition. 
 
 Our fathers, however, in a somewhat vague way, 
 had held from the start that they had right to an 
 autonomy; and that acts of Parliament, if not appoint- 
 ments of the crown, took proper effect upon these 
 shores only by reason of their assent. Their char- 
 ters were held to confirm this doctrine. The con- 
 viction, at first practical and instinctive, rather than 
 theoretic, had grown with their growth, and had 
 been intensified into positive affirmation and public 
 exhibition as the British rule impinged more sharply 
 on their interests and their hopes. It had finally be- 
 come the o-eneral and decisive conviction of the col- 
 
 o 
 
 onies. It had spoken already in armed resistance 
 to the troops of the king. It had been articulated, 
 with gathering emphasis, in many resolves of assem- 
 blies and conventions. It was now, finally, most 
 energetically, set forth to the world in the great 
 Declaration ; and in that utterance, made general, 
 
 not particular, and founding the rights of the people 
 
 42 
 
The Declaration Iiisij'uctive to other Auxtions. 
 
 in this country on principles as wide as humanity 
 itself, there lay an appeal to every nation : — an ap- 
 peal whose words took unparalleled force, were 
 illuminated and made rubrical, in the fire and blood 
 of the following war. 
 
 When the Emperor Ferdinand visited Innsbruck, 
 that beautiful town of the Austrian Tyrol, in 1838, 
 it is said that the inhabitants wrote his name 
 in immense bonfires, along the sides of the precipit- 
 ous hills which shelter the town. Over a space of four 
 or five miles extended that colossal illumination, till 
 the heavens seemed on fire in the far-reflected up- 
 streaming glow. The right of a people, separated 
 from others, to its own institutions — our fathers wrote 
 this in lines so vivid and so laro-e that the whole 
 v/orld could see them ; and they followed that writ- 
 ing with the consenting thunders of so many can- 
 non that even the lands across the Atlantic were 
 shaken and filled with the long reverberation. 
 
 The doctrine had, of course, in every nation, its 
 two-fold internal application, as well as its front 
 against external powers. On the one hand it swept 
 v/ith destroying force against the notion, so long 
 maintained, of the right of certain families in the 
 world, called Hapsburg, Bourbon, Stuart, or what- 
 ever, to govern the rest ; and wherever it was re- 
 ceived it made the imao-ined divine rio-ht of kino-s an 
 obsolete and contemptible fiction. On the other 
 
 hand, it smote with equal energy against the preten- 
 
 43 
 
Oratioji at New York. 
 
 sions of any minority within the state — whether 
 banded together by the ties of descent, or of neigh- 
 borhood in location, or of common opinion, or sup- 
 posed common interest — to govern the rest ; or 
 even to impair the estabhshed and paramount gov- 
 ernment of the rest by separating themselves or- 
 ganically from it. 
 
 It was never the doctrine of the fathers that the 
 people of Kent, Cornwall, or Lincoln, might sever 
 themselves from the rest of England, and, while they 
 had their voice and vote in the public councils, might 
 assert the right to govern the whole, under threat of 
 withdrawal if their minor vote were not suffered to 
 control. They were not seeking to initiate anarch)^ 
 and to make it thenceforth respectable in the world 
 by support of their suffrages. They recognized the 
 fact that the state exists to meet permanent needs, 
 is the ordinance of God as well as the family ; and 
 that He has determined the bounds of men's habita- 
 tion, by rivers, seas, and mountain chains, shaping 
 countries as well as continents into physical coher- 
 ence, while giving one man his birth on the north of 
 the Pyrenees, another on the south, one on the 
 terraced banks of the Rhine, another in English 
 meadow or upland. They saw that a common and 
 fixed habitation, in a country thus physically defined, 
 especially when combined with community of de- 
 scent, of permanent public interest, and of the lan- 
 gfuaafe on v/hich thouf^^ht is interchano-ed — that these 
 
 o o o o 
 
 44 
 
The People, as a Whole, Sovereign. 
 
 make a People ; and such a People, as a true and 
 abiding body-politic, they affirmed had right to shape 
 its government, forbidding others to intermeddle. 
 
 But it must be the general mind of the People 
 which determined the questions thus involved ; not a 
 dictating class within the state, whether known as 
 peers or associated commoners, whether scattered 
 widely, as one among several political parties, or 
 grouped together in some one section, and having a 
 special interest to encourage. The decision of the 
 general public mind, as deliberately reached, and 
 authentically declared, that must be the end of de- 
 bate ; and the right of resistance, or the right of divi- 
 sion, after that, if such right exist, it is not to be vin- 
 dicated from their Declaration. Any one who thought 
 such government by the whole intolerable to him was 
 always at liberty to expatriate himself, and find else- 
 where such other institutions as he might prefer. But 
 he could not tarry, and still not submit. Pie was not a 
 monarch, without the crown, before whose contrary 
 judgment and will the public councils must be dumb. 
 While dwelling in the land, and having the same op- 
 portunity with others to seek the amendment of what 
 he disapproved, the will of the whole was binding 
 upon him ; and that obligation he could not vacate by 
 refusing to accept it. If one could not, neither could 
 ten, nor a hundred, nor a million, who still remained 
 a minority of the whole. 
 
 To allow such a right would have been to make 
 
 45 
 
Oratioji at New York. 
 
 government transparently impossible. Not separate 
 sections only, but counties, townships, school dis- 
 tricts, neighborhoods, must have the same right ; and 
 each individual, with his own will for his final law, 
 must be the complete ultimate State. 
 
 It was no such disastrous folly which the fathers 
 of our Republic affirmed. They ruled out kings, 
 princes, peers, from any control over the People ; 
 and they did not give to a transient minority, 
 wherever it might appear, on whatever question, a 
 greater privilege, because less defined, than that 
 which they jealously withheld from these classes. 
 Such a tyranny of irresponsible occasional minorities 
 would have seemed to them only more intolerable 
 than that of classes, organized, permanent, and limit- 
 ed by law. And when it was affirmed by some, and 
 silently feared by many others, that in our late im- 
 mense civil war the multitudes who adhered to the 
 old Constitution had forgotten or discarded the prin- 
 ciples of the earlier Declaration, those assertions and 
 fears were alike without reason. The People which 
 adopted that Declaration, when distributed into 
 colonies, was the People which afterward, when com- 
 pacted into states, established the Confederation of 
 1 78 1 — imperfect enough, but whose abiding renown 
 it is that under it the war was ended. It was the same 
 People which subsequently framed the supreme 
 Constitution. " We, the people of the United States," 
 
 do ordain and establish the following Constitution, 
 46 
 
The Constitution Sitprcine. 
 
 — so runs the majestic and vital instrument. It 
 contains provisions for its own emendation. When 
 the people will, they may set it aside, and put in 
 place of it one wholly different ; and no other nation 
 can intervene. But while it continues, it, and the 
 laws made normally under it, are not subject to re- 
 sistance by a portion of the people, conspiring" to 
 direct or limit the rest. And whensoever any pre- 
 tension like this shall appear, if ever again it does 
 appear, it will undoubtedly as instantly appear that, 
 even as in the past so in the future, the people 
 whose our government is, and whose complete and 
 magnificent domain God has marked out for it, will 
 subdue resistance, compel submission, forbid seces- 
 sion, though it cost again, as it cost before, four 
 years of war, with treasure uncounted and inestima- 
 ble life. 
 
 The right of a People upon its own territory, as 
 equally against any classes within it or any external 
 powers, this is the doctrine of our Declaration. We 
 know how it here has been applied, and how settled 
 it is upon these shores for the time to come. We 
 know, too, something of what impression it instantly 
 -made upon the minds of other peoples, and how they 
 sprang to greet and accept it. In the fine image of 
 Bancroft, "the astonished nations, as they read that 
 all men are created equal, started out of their leth- 
 argy, like those who have been exiles from child- 
 
 47 
 
Oration at Nciv Yoi^k. 
 
 hood, when tliey suddenly hear the dimly-remembered 
 accents of their mother-tonorue."* 
 
 The theory of scholars had now become the maxim 
 of a State. The diffused ineffectual nebulous light had 
 got itself concentered into an orb ; and the radiance 
 of it, penetrating and hot, shone afar. You know 
 how France responded to it ; with jDassionate speed 
 seeking to be rid of the terrific establishments in 
 church and state which had nearly crushed the life 
 of the people, and with a beautiful though credulous 
 unreason trying to lift, by the grasp of the law, into 
 intelligence and political capacity the masses whose 
 training for thirteen centuries had been despotic. No 
 operation of natural law was any more certain than 
 the failure of that too daring experiment. But the 
 very failure involved progress from it ; involved, 
 undoubtedly, that ultimate success which it was vain 
 to try to extemporize. Certainly the other European 
 powers will not again intervene, as they did, to re- 
 store a despotism which France has abjured, and 
 with foreign bayonets to uphold institutions which it 
 does not desire. Italy, Spain, Germany, England — 
 they are not Republican in the form of their govern- 
 ment, nor as yet democratic in the distribution ol 
 power. But each of them is as full of this organific, 
 self-demonstrating doctrine, as is our own land ; and 
 England would send no troops to Canada to compel 
 its submission if it should decide to set up for itself. 
 
 *Vol. VIII., p. 473. 
 
 48 
 
Liberal States most Secure. 
 
 Neither Italy nor Spain would maintain a monarchy 
 a moment longer than the general mind of the 
 country preferred it. Germany would be fused in 
 the fire of one passion if any foreign nation whatever 
 should assume to dictate the smallest change in one 
 of its laws. 
 
 The doctrine of the proper prerogative of kings, 
 derived from God, which in the last century was 
 more common in Europe than the doctrine of the 
 centrality of the sun in our planetary system, is now 
 as obsolete among the intelligent as are the epicycles 
 of Ptolemy. Every government expects to stand 
 henceforth by assent of the governed, and by no 
 other claim of right. It is strong by beneficence, not 
 by tradition ; and at the height of its military suc- 
 cesses it circulates appeals, and canvasses for ballots. 
 Revolution is carefully sought to be averted, by 
 timely and tender amelioration of the laws. The 
 most progressive and liberal states are most evi- 
 dently secure ; while those which stand, like old 
 olive-trees at Tivoli, with feeble arms supported on 
 pillars, and hollow trunks filled up with stone, are 
 palpably only tempting the blast. An alliance of 
 sovereigns, like that called the Holy, for recon- 
 structing the map of Europe, and parcelling out the 
 passive peoples among separate governments, would 
 to-day be no more possible than would Charlemagne's 
 plan for reconstructing the empire of the West. 
 Even Murad, Sultan of Turkey, now takes the place 
 
 49 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 of Abdul the deposed, " by the grace of God, and the 
 will of the people;" and that accomplished and illus- 
 trious Prince, whose empire under the Southern 
 Cross rivals our own in its extent, and most nearly 
 approaches it on this hemisphere in stability of insti- 
 tutions and in practical freedom, has his surest title 
 to the throne which he honors, in his wise liberality, 
 and his faithful endeavor for the good of his people. 
 As long as in this he continues, as now, a recognized 
 leader among the monarchs — ready to take and seek 
 suggestions from even a democratic Republic — his 
 throne will be steadfast as the water-sheds of Brazil ; 
 and while his successors maintain his spirit, no 
 domestic insurrection will test the question whether 
 they retain that celerity in movement with which 
 Dom Pedro has astonished Americans. 
 
 It is no more possible to reverse this tendency 
 toward popular sovereignty, and to substitute for it 
 the right of families, classes, minorities, or of inter- 
 vening foreign states, than it is to arrest the motion 
 of the earth, and make it swing the other way in its 
 annual orbit. In this, at least, our fathers' Decla- 
 ration has made its impression on the history of 
 mankind. 
 
 It was the act of a People, and not of persons, 
 
 except as these represented and led that. It was the 
 
 act of a People, not starting out On new theories of 
 
 government, so much as developing into forms of 
 
 law and practical force a great and gradual inherit- 
 50 
 
Effect on Popular Advancciiicnt. 
 
 ance of freedom. It was the act of a People, de- 
 claring for others, as for itself, the right of each to 
 its own form of government, without interference 
 from other nations, without restraint by privileged 
 classes. 
 
 It only remains, then, to ask the question how far 
 it has contributed to the peace, the advancement, 
 and the permanent welfare, of the People by which 
 it was set forth ; of other nations which it has af- 
 fected. And to ask this question is almost to 
 answer it. The answer is as evident as the sun in 
 the heavens. 
 
 It certainly cannot be affirmed that we in America, 
 any more than persons or peoples elsewhere, have 
 reached as yet the ideal state, of private liberty 
 combined with a perfect public order, or of culture 
 complete, and a supreme character. The political 
 world, as well as the religious, since Christ was on 
 earth, looks forward, not backward, for its millen- 
 nium. That Golden Aee is still to come which is to 
 shine in the perfect splendor reflected from Him who 
 is ascended ; and no prophecy tells us how long be- 
 fore the advancing race shall reach and cross its 
 glowing marge, or what long effort, or what tumults 
 of battle, are still to precede. 
 
 In this country, too, there have been immense spe- 
 cial impediments to hinder wide popular progress in 
 things which are highest. Our people have had a 
 
 continent to subdue. They have been, from the 
 
 51 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 start, in constant migration. Westward, from the 
 counties of the Hudson and the Mohawk, around 
 the lakes, over the prairies, across the great river,^ — 
 westward still, over alkali plains, across terrible 
 canons, up gorges of the mountains where hardly 
 the wild goat could find footing, — westward always, 
 till the Golden Gate opened out on the sea which 
 has been made ten thousand miles wide, as if nothing 
 less could stop the march, — this has been the popu- 
 lar movement, from almost the day of the g'reat Dec- 
 laration. To-morrow's tents have been pitched in new 
 fields ; and last year's houses await new possessors. 
 With such constant change, such wide dislocation 
 of the mass of the people from early and settled 
 home-associations, and with the incessant occupation 
 of the thoughts by the great physical problems pre- 
 sented, — not so much by any struggle for existence, 
 as by harvests for which the prairies waited, by mills 
 for which the rivers clamored, by the coal and the 
 gold which offered themselves to the grasp of the 
 miner, — it would not have been strange if a great 
 and dangerous decadence had occurred in that do- 
 mestic and private virtue of which Home is the 
 nursery, in that generous and reverent public spirit 
 which is but the effluence of its combined rays. It 
 would have been wholly too much to expect that 
 under such influences the highest progress should 
 have been realized, in speculative thought, in ar- 
 tistic culture, or in the researches of pure science. 
 52 
 
Literary Attainments. 
 
 Accordingly, we find that in these departments 
 not enough has been accomplished to make our 
 progress signal in them, though here and there the 
 eminent souls " that are like stars and dwell apart " 
 have illumined themes highest with their high inter- 
 pretation. But History has been cultivated among 
 us, with an enthusiasm, to an extent, hardly, I think, 
 to have been anticipated among a people so recent 
 and expectant; and Prescott, Motley, Irving, Tick- 
 nor, with him upon whose splendid page all Ameri- 
 can history has been amply illustrated, are known as 
 familiarly and honored as highly in Europe as here. 
 We have had as well distinguished poets, and have 
 them now ; to whom the nation has been respon- 
 sive ; who have not only sung themselves, but 
 through whom the noblest poems of the Old World 
 have come into the English tongue, rendered in- fit 
 and perfect music, and some of whose minds, blos- 
 somin:^ lonsf aeo in the solemn or beautiful fancies 
 of youth, with perennial energy still ripen to new 
 fruit as they near or cross their four-scOre years. 
 In Medicine, and Law, as well as in Theology, in 
 Fiction, Biography, and the vivid Narrative of explo- 
 ration and discovery, the people whose birth-day we 
 commemorate has added something to the posses- 
 sion of men. Its sculptors and painters have won 
 high places in the brilliant realm of modern art. 
 Publicists like Wheaton, jurists like Kent, have 
 gained a celebrity reflecting honor on the land ; and 
 
 53 
 
Oration at Nczv York. 
 
 if no orator, so vast in knowledge, so profound and 
 discursive in philosophical thought, so affluent in 
 imagery, and so glorious in diction, as Edmund 
 Burke, has yet appeared, we must remember that 
 centuries were needed to produce him elsewhere, 
 and that any of the great Parliamentary debaters, 
 aside from him, have been matched or surpassed in 
 the hearing of those who have hung with rapt sym- 
 pathetic attention on the lips of Clay, or of Rufus 
 Choate, or have felt themselves listening to the 
 mightiest mind which ever touched theirs when they 
 stood beneath the imperial voice in which Webster 
 spoke. 
 
 In applied science there has been much done in 
 the country, for which the world admits itself our 
 grateful debtor. I need not multiply illustrations of 
 this, from locomotives, printing-presses, sewing- 
 machines, revolvers, steam-reapers, bank-locks. One 
 instance suffices, most sip-nal of all. 
 
 When Morse, from Washington, thirty-two years 
 ago, sent over the wares his word to Baltimore, 
 " What hath God wrought," he had given to all 
 the nations of mankind an instrument the most sen- 
 sitive, expansive, quickening, which the world yet 
 possesses. He had bound the earth in electric net- 
 work. 
 
 England touches India to-day, and France Algeria, 
 while we are in contact with all the continents, upon 
 those scarcely perceptible nerves. The great strat- 
 
 54 
 
TJic Electric Telegraph. 
 
 eo-ist, like Von Moltke, with these in his hands, 
 from the silence of his office directs campaigns, dic- 
 tates marches, wins victories ; the statesman in the 
 cabinet inspires and regulates the distant diplomacies ; 
 while the traveler in any port or mart is by the 
 same marvel of mechanism in instant communication 
 with all centres of commerce. It is certainly not 
 too much to say that no other invention of the world 
 in this century has so richly deserved the medals, 
 crosses, and diamond decorations, the applause of 
 senates, the gifts of kings, which were showered upon 
 its author, as did this invention, which finally taught 
 and utilized the lightnings whose nature a signer 
 of the great Declaration had made apparent. 
 
 But after all it is not so much in special inventions, 
 or in eminent attainments made by individuals, that 
 we are to find the answer to the question, " What 
 did that day, a hundred years since, accomplish for 
 us ? " Still less is it found in the progress we 
 have made in outward wealth and material success. 
 This might have been made, approximately at least, 
 if the British supremacy had here continued. The 
 prairies would have been as productive as now, the 
 mines of copper and silver and gold as rich and ex- 
 tensive, the coal-beds as vast, and the cotton-fields 
 as fertile, if we had been born the subjects of the 
 Georges, or of Victoria. Steam would have kept its 
 propulsive force, and sea and land have been theatres 
 of its triumph. The river would have been as 
 
 55- 
 
Oration at Nciv York. 
 
 smooth a highway for the commerce which seeks it ; 
 and the leap of every mountain stream would have 
 given as swift and constant a push to the wheels that 
 set spindles and saws in motion. Electricity itself 
 would have lost no property, and might have become 
 as completely as now the fire-winged messenger of 
 the thought of mankind. 
 
 But what we have now, and should not have had 
 except for that paper which the Congress adopted, 
 is the general and increasing popular advancement 
 in knowledge, vigor, as I believe in moral culture, of 
 which our country has been the arena, and in which 
 lies its hope for the future. The independence of 
 the nation has reacted, with sympathetic force, on 
 the personal life which the nation includes. It has 
 made men more resolute, aspiring, confident, and 
 more susceptible to whatever exalts. The doctrine 
 that all by creation are equal, — not in respect of 
 physical force or of mental endowment, of means for 
 culture or inherited privilege, but in respect of im- 
 mortal faculty, of duty to each other, of right to 
 protection and to personal development, — this has 
 o-iven manliness to the poor, enterprise to the weak, 
 a kindling hope to the most obscure. It has made 
 the individuals of whom the nation is composed 
 more alive to the forces which educate and exalt. 
 
 There has been incessant motive, too, for the wide 
 
 and constant employment of these forces. It has 
 
 been felt that, as the People is sovereign here, that 
 56 
 
The Efficiency of the Church. 
 
 People must be trained in mind and spirit for its 
 august and sovereign function. Tlie establishment 
 of common-schools, for a needful primary secular 
 training, has been an instinct of Society, only recog- 
 nized and repeated in provisions of statutes. The 
 establishment of higher schools, classical and gen- 
 eral, of colleges, scientific and professional semi- 
 naries, has been as well the impulse of the nation, 
 and the furtherance of them a care of governments. 
 The immense expansion of the press in this country 
 has been based fundamentally upon the same im- 
 pulse, and has wrought with beneficent general 
 force in the same direction. Religious instruction 
 has gone as widely as this distribution of secular 
 knowledge. 
 
 It used to be thought that a Church dissevered 
 from the State must be feeble. Wanting wealth of 
 endowments and dignity of titles — its clergy entitled 
 to no place among the peers, its revenues assured by 
 no leo-al enactments — it must remain obscure and 
 poor ; while the absence of any external limitations, 
 of parliamentary statutes and a legal creed, must 
 leave it liable to endless division, and tend to its 
 speedy disintegration into sects and schisms. It 
 seemed as hopeless to look for strength, wealth, be- 
 neficence, for extensive educational and missionary 
 work, to such churches as these, as to look for ag- 
 gressive military organization to a convention of 
 
 57 
 
Oration at Nczu York. 
 
 farmers, or for the volume and thunder of Niagara 
 to a thousand sinking- and separate rills. 
 
 But the work which was given to be done in this 
 country was so great and momentous, and has been 
 so constant, that matching itself against that work, 
 the Church, under whatever name, has realized a 
 strength, and developed an activity, wholly fresh in 
 the world in modern times. It has not been antago- 
 nized by that instinct of liberty which always awakens 
 against its work where religion is required by law. 
 It has seized the opportunity. Its ministers and 
 members have had their owa standards, leaders, 
 laws, and sometimes have quarreled, fiercely enough, 
 as to which were the better. But in the work which 
 was set them to do, to give to the sovereign Amer- 
 ican people the knowledge of God in the Gospel of 
 His Son, their only strife has been one of emulation — 
 to go the furthest, to give the most, and to bless most 
 largely the land and its future. 
 
 The spiritual incentive has of course been su- 
 preme ; but patriotism has added its impulse to the 
 work. It has been felt that Christianity is the basis 
 of Republican' empire, its bond of cohesion, its life- 
 giving law ; that the manuscript copies of the Gospels, 
 sent by Gregory to Augustine at Canterbury, and still 
 preserved on sixth century parchments at Oxford and 
 Cambridge — more than Magna Charta itself, these are 
 the roots of English liberty ; that Magna Charta, and 
 the Petition of Right, with our completing Declaration, 
 58 
 
Effect of Educational Work. 
 
 were possible only because these had been before them. 
 And so in the work of keeping Christianity prevalent 
 in the land, all earnest churches have eagerly striven. 
 Their preachers have been heard where the pioneer's 
 fire scarcely was kindled. Their schools have been 
 gathered in the temporary camp, not less than in the 
 hamlet or town. They have sent their books with 
 lavish distribution, they have scattered their Bibles 
 like leaves of autumn, where settlements hardly were 
 more than prophesied. In all languages of the land 
 they have told the old story of the Lav/ and the 
 Cross, a present Redemption, and a coming Tribunal. 
 The highest truths, most solemn and inspiring, have 
 been the truths most constantly in hand. It has 
 been felt that, in the highest sense, a muscular Chris- 
 tianity was indispensable where men lifted up axes 
 upon the thick trees. The delicate speculations of the 
 closet and the schools were too dainty for the work ; 
 and the old confessions of Councils and Reformers, 
 whose undecaying and sovereign energy no use ex- 
 hausts, have been those always most familiar, where 
 the trapper on his stream, or the miner in his gulch, 
 has found priest or minister on his track. 
 
 Of course not all the work has been fruitful. Not 
 all God's acorns come to oaks, but here and there 
 one. Not all the seeds of flowers germinate, but 
 enough to make some radiant gardens. And out of 
 all this work and gift, has come a mental and moral 
 training, to the nation at large, such as it certainly 
 
 59 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 would not have had except for this effort, the effort 
 for which would not have been made, on a scale so 
 immense, except for this incessant aim to fit the 
 nation for its great experiment of self-regulation. 
 The Declaration of Independence has been the great 
 charter of Public Education ; has given impulse and 
 scope to this prodigious Missionary work. 
 
 The result of the whole is evident enough. I am 
 not here as the eulogist of our People, beyond what 
 facts justify. I admit, with regret, that American 
 manners sometimes are coarse, and American culture 
 often very imperfect ; that the noblest examples of 
 consummate training imply a leisure which we have 
 not had, and are perhaps most easily produced where 
 social advantages are more permanent than here, and 
 the law of heredity has a wider recognition. We all 
 know, too well, how much of even vice and shame 
 there has been, and is, in our national life ; how slug- 
 gish the public conscience has been before sharpest 
 appeals ; how corruption has entered high places in 
 the government, and the blister of its touch has been 
 upon laws, as well as on the acts of prominent offi- 
 cials. And we know the reckless greed and ambi- 
 tion, the fierce party spirit, the personal wrangles and 
 jealous animosities, with which our Congress has 
 been often dishonored, at which the nation — sadder 
 still — has sometimes laughed, in idiotic unreason. 
 
 But knowing all this, and with the impression of 
 it full on our thoughts, we may exult in the real, 
 
 Co 
 
The Naiioii s Tiloral Soinidiiess. 
 
 steady, and prophesying growth of a better spirit 
 toward dominance in the land. I scout the thouoht 
 that we as a people are Avorse than our fathers ! 
 John Adams, at the head of the War Department, 
 in 1776, wrote bitter laments of the corruption which 
 existed in even that infant age of the Republic, and 
 of the spirit of venality, rapacious and insatiable, 
 which was then the most alarming enemy of America. 
 He declared himself ashamed of the age which he 
 lived In ! In Jefferson's day, all Federalists expected 
 the universal dominion of French infidelity. In 
 Jackson's day, all Whigs thought the country gone 
 to ruin already, as If Mr. Biddle had had the entire 
 public hope locked up in the vaults of his terminated 
 bank. In Polk's day, the excitements of the Mexi- 
 can War gave life and germination to many seeds of 
 rascality. There has never been a time — not here 
 alone, In any country — when the fierce light of in- 
 cessant Inquiry blazing on men in public life, would 
 not have revealed forces of evil like those we have 
 seen, or when the condemnation which followed the 
 discovery would have been sharper. And It Is 
 among my deepest convictions th.:L, with all which 
 has happened to debase and debauch it, the nation 
 at large was never before more mentally vigorous or 
 morally sound. 
 
 Gentlemen : The demonstration Is around us ! 
 
 This city. If any place on the continent, should have 
 
 been the one where a reckless wickedness should 
 
 61 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 have had sure prevalence, and reforming virtue the 
 least chance of success. Starting in 1790 with a 
 white population of less than thirty thousand — grow- 
 ing steadily for forty years, till that population had 
 multiplied six-fold — taking into itself, from that time 
 on, such multitudes of emigrants from all parts of 
 the earth that the dictionaries of the languages 
 spoken in its streets would make a library — all forms 
 of luxury coming with wealth, and all means and 
 facilities for every vice — the primary elections being 
 always the seed-bed out of which springs its choice 
 of rulers, with the influence which it sends to the 
 public councils — its citizens so absorbed in their pur- 
 suits that oftentimes, for years together, large num- 
 bers of them have left its affairs in hands the most 
 of all unsuited to so supreme and delicate a trust — 
 it might well have been expected that while its docks 
 were echoing with a commerce which encompassed 
 the globe, while its streets were thronged with the 
 eminent and the gay from all parts of the land, 
 while its homes had in them uncounted thousands of 
 noble men and cultured women, while its stately 
 squares swept out year by year across new spaces, 
 while it founded great institutions of beneficence, and 
 shot new spires upward toward heaven, and turned 
 the rocky waste to a pleasure-ground famous in the 
 earth, its government would decay, and its reckless- 
 ness of moral ideas, if not as well of political prin- 
 ciples, would become apparent. 
 62 
 
This City a 71 Ilhistration. 
 
 Men have prophesied this, from the outset till now. 
 The fear of it began with the first great advance of 
 the wealth, population, and fame of the city ; and 
 there have not been wanting facts in its history 
 which served to renew, if not to justify, the fear. 
 
 But when the War of 1861 broke on the land, and 
 shadowed every home within it, this city, — which 
 had voted by immense majorities against the existing 
 administration, and which was linked by unnumbered 
 ties with the vast communities then rushing to as- 
 sail it, — flung out its banners from window and spire, 
 from City Hall and newspaper office, and poured 
 its wealth and life into the service of sustaining the 
 Government, with a swiftness and a vehement 
 energy that were never surpassed. When, after- 
 ward, greedy and treacherous men, capable and 
 shrewd, deceiving the unwary, hiring the skillful, 
 and moulding the very law to their uses, had con- 
 centrated In their hands the government of the city, 
 and had bound it in seemingly Invincible chains, 
 while they plundered its treasury, — it rose upon 
 them, when advised of the facts, as Samson rose 
 upon the Philistines ; and the two new cords that 
 were upon his hands no more suddenly became as 
 flax that was burnt than did those manacles imposed 
 upon the city by the craft of the Ring. 
 
 Its leaders of opinion to-day are the men — like 
 him who presides in our assembly — whom virtue ex- 
 alts, and character crowns. It rejoices in a Chief 
 
 63 
 
Oration at N'cw York. 
 
 Magistrate as upright and intrepid, in a virtuous 
 cause, as any of those whom he succeeds. It is 
 part of a State whose present position, in laws, and 
 officers, and the spirit of its people, does no discredit 
 to the noblest of its memories. And from these 
 heights between the rivers, looking over the land, 
 looking out on the earth to which its daily embassies 
 go, it sees nowhere beneath the sun a city more 
 ample in its moral securities, a city more dear to 
 those who possess it, a city more splendid in promise 
 and in hope. 
 
 What is true of the city is true, in effect, of all the 
 land. Two things, at least, have been established 
 by our national history, the impression of which the 
 world will not lose. The one is, that institutions like 
 ours, when sustained by a prevalent moral life 
 throughout the nation, are naturally permanent. The 
 other is, that they tend to peaceful relations with 
 other states. They do this in fulfillment of an or- 
 ganic tendency, and not through any accident of 
 location. The same tendency will inhere in them, 
 wheresoever established. 
 
 In this age of the world, and in all the states which 
 Christianity quickens, the allowance of free move- 
 ment to the popular mind is essential to the stability 
 of public institutions. There may be restraint enough 
 to o-uide, and keep such movement from premature 
 exhibition. But there cannot be force enough used 
 to resist it, and to reverse its gathering current. If 
 64 
 
Progress in Europe. 
 
 there is, the government is swiftly overthrown, as in 
 France so often, or is left on one side, as Austria 
 has been by the advancing German people ; like the 
 castle of Heidelberg, at once palace and fortress, 
 high-placed and superb, but only the stateliest ruin 
 in Europe, while the rail-train thunders through the 
 tunnel beneath it, and the Neckar sines alonp- its 
 near channel as if tower and tournament never had 
 been. Revolution, transformation, organic change, 
 have thus all the time for this hundred years been 
 proceeding in Europe ; sometimes silent, but oftener 
 amid thunders of stricken fields ; sometimes pacific, 
 but oftener with garments rolled in blood. 
 
 In England the progress has been peaceful, the 
 popular demands being ratified as law whenever the 
 need became apparent. It has been vast, as well as 
 peaceful ; in the extension of suffrage, in the ever- 
 increasing power of the Commons, in popular educa- 
 tion. Chatham himself would hardly know his own 
 England if he should return to it. The Throne con- 
 tinues, illustrated by the virtues of her who fills it ; 
 and the ancient forms still obtain in Parliament. But 
 it could not have occurred to him, or to Burke, that 
 a century after the ministry of Grenville the embarka- 
 tion of the Pilgrims would be one of the prominent 
 historical pictures on the panels of the lobby of the 
 House of Lords, or that the name of Oliver Crom- 
 well, and of Bradshaw, President of the High Court 
 
 of Justice, would be cut in the stone in Westminster 
 
 65 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 Abbey, over the places in which they were buried, 
 and whence their decaying bodies were dragged to 
 the gibbet and the ditch. England is now, as has 
 been well said, "an aristocratic Republic, with a 
 permanent Executive." Its only perils lie in the fact 
 of that aristocracy, which, however, is flexible enough 
 to endure, of that permanence in the Executive, which 
 would hardly outlive one vicious Prince. 
 
 What changes have taken place in France, I need 
 not remind you, nor how uncertain is still its future. 
 You know how the swift untiring wheels, of advance 
 or reaction, have rolled this way and that, in Italy, 
 and in Spain ; how Germany has had to be recon- 
 structed ; how Hungary has had to fight and suffer 
 for that just place in the Austrian councils which 
 only imperial defeat surrendered. You know how 
 precarious the equilibrium now is, in many states, 
 between popular rights and princely prerogative ; 
 what armies are maintained, to fortify governments ; 
 what fear of sudden and violent change, like an ava- 
 lanche tumbling at the touch of a foot, perplexes na- 
 tions. The records of change make the history of 
 Europe. The expectation of change is almost as 
 wide as the continent itself. 
 
 Meantime, how permanent has been this Republic, 
 which seemed at the outset to foreign spectators a 
 mere sudden insurrection, a mere organized riot ! Its 
 organic law, adopted after exciting debate, but arous- 
 ing no battle and enforced by no army, has been in- 
 
 66 
 
Triumph of the Republic. 
 
 terpreted, and peacefully administered, with one great 
 exception, from the beginning. It has once been as- 
 sailed, with passion and skill, with splendid daring and 
 unbounded self-sacrifice, by those who sought a sec- 
 tional advantage through its destruction. No mon- 
 archy of the w^orld could have stood that assault. It 
 seemed as if the last fatal Apocalypse had come, to 
 drench the land with plague and blood, and wrap it in 
 a fiery gloom. The Republic, 
 
 — " pouring, like the tide into a breach, 
 With ample and brim fulness of its force," 
 
 subdued the rebellion, emancipated the race which 
 had been in subjection, restored the dominion of the 
 old Constitution, amended its provisions in the con- 
 trary direction from that which had been so fiercely 
 sought, gave it guaranties of endurance while the 
 continent lasts, and made its ensigns more eminent 
 than ever in the regions from which they had been 
 expelled. The very portions of the people which 
 then sought its overthrow are now again its applaud- 
 ing adherents, — the great and constant reconciling 
 force, the tranquillizing Irenarch, being the freedom 
 which it leaves in their hands. 
 
 It has kept its place, this Republic of ours, in spite 
 of the rapid expansion of the nation over territory 
 so wide that tlie scanty strip of the original states is 
 
 only as a fringe on its immense mantle. It has kept 
 
 67 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 its place, while vehement debates, involving the pro- 
 foundest ethical principles, have stirred to its depths 
 the whole public mind. It has kept its place, while 
 the tribes of mankind have been pouring upon it, 
 seeking: the shelter and freedom which it sfave. It 
 saw an illustrious President murdered, by the bullet 
 of an assassin. It saw his place occupied as quietly 
 by another as if nothing unforeseen or alarming had 
 occurred. It saw prodigious armies assembled, for 
 its defence. It saw those armies, at the end of the 
 war, marching in swift and long procession up the 
 streets of the Capital, and then dispersing into their 
 former peaceful citizenship, as if they had had no arms 
 in their hands. The General before whose skill and 
 will those armies had been shot upon the forces which 
 opposed them, and whose word had been their mili- 
 tary law, remained for three years an appointed offi- 
 cer of the government he had saved. Elected then 
 to be the head of that government, and again re-elect- 
 ed by the ballots of his countrymen, in a few months 
 more he will have retired, to be thenceforth a citizen 
 like the rest, eligible to office, and entitled to vote, 
 but with no thought of any prerogative descending to 
 him, or to his children, from his great service and 
 military fame. The Republic, whose triumphing ar- 
 mies he led, will remember his name, and be grateful 
 for his work ; but neither to him, nor to any one else, 
 will It ever give sovereignty over itself 
 
 From the Lakes to the Gulf its will is the law, its 
 
 68 
 
Pdrmanejice of the Republic. 
 
 dominion complete. Its centripetal and centrifugal 
 forces are balanced, almost as In the astronomy of the 
 heavens. Decentralizing authority, It puts his own 
 part of It Into the hand of every citizen. Giving free 
 scope to private enterprise, allowing not only, but ac- 
 cepting and encouraging, each movement of the pub- 
 lic reason which Is Its only terrestrial rule, there Is no 
 threat. In all Its sky, of division or downfall. It can- 
 not be successfully assailed from within. It never 
 will be assailed from without, with a blow at Its life, 
 while other nations continue sane. 
 
 It has been sometimes compared to a pyramid, 
 broad-based and secure, not liable to overthrow as is 
 obelisk or column, by storm or age. The compari- 
 son is just, but it is not sufficient. It should rather 
 be compared to one of the permanent features of na- 
 ture, and not to any artificial construction : — to the 
 river, which flows, like our own Hudson, along the 
 courses that nature opens, forever In motion, but for- 
 ever the same ; to the lake, which lies on common 
 days level and bright in placid stillness, while it gathers 
 its fullness from many lands, and lifts its weaves in 
 stormy strength when winds assail it ; to the mountain, 
 which Is shaped by no formula of art, and which only 
 rarely, in some supreme sun-burst, flushes with color, 
 but whose roots the very earthquake cannot shake, 
 and on whose- brow the storms fall hurtless, while 
 under its shelter the cottage nestles, and up its sides 
 
 the gardens climb. 
 
 69 
 
Oration at Nczv York. 
 So stands the Republic : 
 
 Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, 
 As broad and general as the casing air. 
 
 Our government has been permanent, as estabHsh- 
 ed upon the old Declaration, and steadily sustained 
 by the undecaying and moulding life in the soul of 
 the Nation. It has been peaceful, also, for the most 
 part, in scheme and in spirit ; and has shown at no 
 time such an appetite for war as has been familiar, 
 within the century, in many lands. 
 
 This may be denied, by foreign critics ; or at any 
 rate be explained, if the fact be admitted, by our iso- 
 lation from other states, by our occupation in peace- 
 ful labors, which have left no room for martial enter- 
 prise, perhaps by an alleged want in us of that chiv- 
 alric and high-pitched spirit which is gladdened by 
 danger and which welcomes the fray. I do not think 
 the explanation sufficient, the analysis just. 
 
 This people was trained to military effort, from its 
 beginning. It had in it the blood of Saxon and Nor- 
 man, neither of whom was afraid of war ; the very 
 same blood which a few years after was poured out 
 like water at Marston Moor, and Naseby, and Dun- 
 bar. Ardor and fortitude were added to its spirit by 
 those whose fathers had followed Colrgni, by the 
 children of those whom Alva and Parma could not 
 conquer, or whom Gustavus had inspired with his 
 intense and paramount will. With savages in the 
 
 woods, and the gray wolf prowling around its cabins, 
 70 
 
Martial Spirit of the People. 
 
 the hand of this people was from the first as famiHar 
 with the gun-stock as with mattock or plough ; and 
 it spent more time, inproportio.} to its leisure, it spent 
 more life, in proportion to its numbers, from 1607 to 
 1776, in protecting itself against violent assault than 
 was spent by France, the most martial of kingdoms, 
 on all the bloody fields of Europe. 
 
 Then came the Revolution, with its years of war, 
 and its crowning success, to intensify, and almost to 
 consecrate this spirit, and to give it distribution ; 
 while, from that time, the nation has been taking into 
 its substance abounding elements from all the fighting 
 peoples of the earth. The Irishman, who is never 
 so entirely himself as v/hen the battle-storm hurtles 
 around him ; the Frenchman, who says "After you, 
 Gentlemen," before the infernal fire of Fontenoy ; 
 the German, whose irresistible tread the world lately 
 heard at Sadowa and Sedan,- — these have been en- 
 tering, representatives of two of them entering by 
 millions, into the Republic. If any nation, therefore, 
 should have a fierce and martial temper, this is the 
 one. If any people should keep its peaceful neigh- 
 bors in fear, lest its aggression should smite their 
 homes, it is a people born, and trained, and replen- 
 ished like this, admitting no rule but its own will, and 
 conscious of a strength whose annual increase makes 
 arithmetic pant. 
 
 What has been the fact ? Lay out of sight that 
 
 late civil war which could not be averted, when once 
 
 71 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 it had been threatened, except by the sacrifice of the 
 government itself, and a wholly unparalleled public 
 suicide, and how much of war with foreign powers 
 has the century seen ? There has been a frequent 
 crackle of musketry along the frontiers, as Indian 
 tribes, which refused to be civilized, have slowly and 
 fiercely retreated toward the West. There was one 
 war declared against Tripoli, in 1801, when the Re- 
 public took by the throat the African pirates to whom 
 Europe paid tribute, and when the gallantry of Preble 
 and Decatur gave early distinction to our navy. 
 There was a war declared against England, in 181 2, 
 when our seamen had been taken from under our 
 flag, from the decks indeed of our national ships, and 
 our commerce had been practically swept from the 
 seas. There was a war affirmed already to exist in 
 Mexico, in 1846, entered into by surprise, never for- 
 mally declared, against which the moral sentiment 
 of the nation rose widely in revolt, but which in its 
 result added largely to our territory, opened to us 
 Californian treasures, and wrote the names of Buena 
 Vista and Monterey on our short annals. 
 
 That has been our military history ; and if a Peo- 
 ple, as powerful and as proud, has anywhere been 
 more peaceable also, in the last hundred years, the 
 strictest research fails to find it. Smarting with the 
 injury done us by England during the crisis of our 
 national peril, in spite of the remonstrances presented 
 
 through that distinguished citizen who should have 
 72 
 
A Pacific Temper natural to the Republic. 
 
 been your orator to-day, — while hostile taunts had 
 incensed our people, while burning ships had exas- 
 perated commerce, and while what looked like artful 
 evasions had made statesmen indignant, — with a half- 
 million men who had hardly yet laid down their arms, 
 with a navy never before so vast, or so fitted for 
 service, — when a war with England would have had 
 the force of passion behind it, and would at any rate 
 have shown to the world that the nation respects 
 its starry flag, and means to have it secure on the 
 seas, — we referred all differences to arbitration, 
 appointed commissioners, tried the cause at Geneva, 
 with advocates, not with armies, and got a prompt 
 and ample verdict. If Canada now lay next to York- 
 shire it would not be safer from armed incursion than 
 it is when divided b}^ only a custom-house from all 
 the strength of this Republic. 
 
 The fact is apparent, and the reason not less so. 
 A monarchy, just as it is despotic, finds incitement 
 to war ; for pre-occupation of the popular mind ; to 
 gratify nobles, officers, the army ; for historic renown. 
 An intelligent Republic hates war, and shuns it. It 
 counts standing armies a curse only second to an 
 annual pestilence. It wants no glory but from 
 growth. It delights itself in arts of peace, seeks 
 social enjoyment and increase of possessions, and 
 feels instinctively that, like Israel of old, " its strength 
 is to sit still." It cannot bear to miss the husbandman 
 from the fields, the citizen from the town, the house- 
 
 73 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 father from the home, the worshipper from the church. 
 To change or shape other people's institutions is no 
 part of its business. To force them to accept its 
 scheme of government would simply contradict and 
 nullify its charter. Except, then, when it is startled into 
 passion by the cry of a suffering under oppression 
 which stirs its pulses into tumult, or when it is 
 assailed in its own rights, citizens, property, it will 
 not go to war ; nor even then, if diplomacy can find 
 a remedy for the wrong. "Millions for defence," 
 said Cotesworth Pinckney to the French Directory, 
 when Talleyrand in their name had threatened him 
 with war, "but not a cent for tribute." He might 
 have added, " and not a dollar for aggressive strife." 
 It will never be safe to insult such a nation, or 
 to outrage its citizens ; for the reddest blood is in its 
 veins, and some Captain Ingraham may always 
 appear, to lay his little sloop of war along-side the 
 offending frigate, with shotted guns, and a per- 
 emptory summons. There is a way to make powder 
 inexplosive ; but, treat it chemically how you will, 
 the dynamite will not stand many blows of the ham- 
 mer. The detonating tendency is too permanent in 
 it. But if left to itself, such a People will be peaceful, 
 as ours has been. It will foster peace among the 
 nations. It will tend to dissolve great permanent 
 armaments, as the light conquers ice, and summer 
 sunshine breaks the glacier \vhich a hundred trip- 
 hammers could only scar. The longer it continues, 
 
 74 
 
The Day to be Remembered. 
 
 the more widely and effectively its influence spreads, 
 the more will its benign example hasten the day, so 
 long foretold, so surely coming, when 
 
 The war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furled, 
 In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World. 
 
 Mr. President: Fellow-Citizens: — To an extent 
 too great for your patience, but with a rapid incom- 
 pleteness that is only too evident as we match it with 
 the theme, I have outlined before you some of the 
 reasons why we have right to commemorate the day 
 whose hundredth anniversary has brought us to- 
 gether, and why the paper then adopted has interest 
 and importance not only for us, but for all the ad- 
 vancine sons of men. Thank God that he who 
 framed the Declaration, and he who was its foremost 
 champion, both lived to see the nation they had 
 shaped growing to greatness, and to die together, 
 in that marvelous coincidence, on its semi-centennial ! 
 The fifty years which have passed since then have 
 only still further honored their work. Mr. Adams 
 was mistaken in the day which he named as the one 
 to be most fondly remembered. It was not that on 
 which Independence of the empire of Great Britain 
 was formally resolved. It was that on which the 
 reasons were given which justified the act, and 
 the principles were announced which made it of 
 secular significance to mankind. But he would have 
 been absolutely right in saying of the fourth day 
 
 75 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 what he did say of the second: it "will be the most 
 remarkable epoch in the history of America ; to be 
 celebrated by succeeding generations as the great 
 anniversary festival, commemorated as the day of de- 
 liverance, by solemn acts of devotion to Almighty 
 God, from one end of the continent to the other." 
 
 It will not be forgotten, in the land or in the earth, 
 until the stars have fallen from their poise ; or until 
 our vivid morning-star of Republican liberty, not 
 losing its lustre, has seen its special brightness fade 
 in the ampler effulgence of a freedom universal ! 
 
 But while we rejoice in that which is past, and 
 gladly recognize the vast organific mystery of life 
 which was in the Declaration, the plans of Providence 
 wdiich slowly and silently, but with ceaseless progres- 
 sion, had led the way to it, the immense and enduring 
 results of good which from it have flowed, let us not 
 forget the duty which always equals privilege, and 
 that of peoples, as well as of persons, to whomsoever 
 much is given, shall only therefore the more be 
 required. Let us consecrate ourselves, each one of 
 us, here, to the further duties which wait to be 
 fulfilled, to the work which shall consummate the 
 great work of the Fathers ! 
 
 From scanty soils come richest grapes, and on 
 severe and rocky slopes the trees are often of tough- 
 est fibre. The wines of Riidesheim and Johannis- 
 berg cannot be grown in the fatness of gardens, and 
 
 the cedars of Lebanon disdain the levels of marsh 
 76 
 
The Duty of American Citizens. 
 
 and meadow. So a heroism is sometimes native to 
 penury which luxury enervates, and the great reso- 
 lution which sprang up in the blast, and blossomed 
 under inclement skies, may lose its shapely and stead- 
 fast strength when the air is all of summer softness. 
 In exuberant resources is to be the coming American 
 peril ; in a swiftly increasing luxury of life. The old 
 humility, hardihood, patience, are too likely to be lost 
 when material success again opens, as it will, all 
 avenues to wealth, and when its brilliant prizes 
 solicit, as again they will, the national spirit. 
 
 Be it ours to endeavor that that temper of the 
 Fathers which was nobler than their work shall live 
 in the children, and exalt to its tone their comine 
 career ; that political intelligence, patriotic devotion, 
 a reverent spirit toward Him who is above, an exult- 
 ing expectation of the future of the World, and a 
 sense of our relation to it, shall be, as of old, essential 
 forces in our public life ; that education and religion 
 keep step all the time with the Nation's advance, and 
 the School and the Church be always at home wher- 
 ever its flag shakes out its folds. In a spirit worthy 
 the memories of the Past let us set ourselves to ac- 
 complish the tasks which, in the sphere of national 
 politics, still await completion. We burn ' the sun- 
 shine of other years, when we ignite the wood or 
 coal upon our hearths. We enter a privilege which 
 ages have secured, in our daily enjoyment of polit- 
 ical freedom. While the kindling glow irradiates our 
 
 77 
 
Oration at New York. 
 
 homes, let it shed its lustre on our spirit, and quicken 
 it for its further work. 
 
 Let us fight against the tendency of educated 
 men to reserve themselves from politics, remem- 
 bering that no other form of human activity is so grand 
 or effective as that which affects, first the character, 
 and then the revelation of character in the govern- 
 ment, of a great and free People. Let us make relig- 
 ious dissension here, as a force in politics, as absurd 
 as witchcraft.* Let party names be nothing to us, in 
 comparison with that costly and proud inheritance of 
 liberty and of law, which parties exist to conserve 
 and enlarge, which any party w^ill have here to main- 
 tain if it would not be buried, at the next cross-roads, 
 with a stake through its breast. Let us seek the 
 unity of all sections of the Republic, through the 
 prevalence in all of mutual respect, through the assur- 
 ance in all of local freedom, through the mastery in 
 all of that supreme spirit which flashed from the lips 
 of Patrick Henry, when he said, in the first Continen- 
 tal Congress, " I am not a Virginian, but an American." 
 Let us take care that labor maintains its ancient place 
 
 * Cromwell Is sometimes considqred a bigot. His rule on this sub- 
 ject is therefore the more worthy of record ; " Sir, the State, in choos- 
 ing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions ; if they be willing 
 faithfully to serve it, that satisfies, * * Take heed of being sharp, or 
 too easily sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object 
 little, but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning 
 matters of religion. If there be any other offence to be charged upon 
 him, that must, in a judicial way, receive determination." — Letter to 
 Major-General Crawford, lotii March, 1643. 
 78 
 
Our Relation to Past, and Future. 
 
 of privilege and honor, and that industry has no fet- 
 ters imposed, of legal restraint or of social discredit, 
 to hinder its work or to lessen its wa^e. Let us 
 turn, and overturn, in public discussion, in political 
 change, till we secure a Civil Service, honorable, in- 
 telligent, and worthy of the land, in which capable 
 integrity, not partisan zeal, shall be the condition of 
 each public trust ; and let us resolve that whatever it 
 may cost, of labor and of patience, of sharper econo- 
 my and of general sacrifice, it shall come to pass that 
 wherever American labor toils, wherever American 
 enterprise plans, wherever American commerce reach- 
 es, thither again shall go as of old the country's coin 
 — the American Eagle, with the encircling stars and 
 golden plumes ! 
 
 In a word, Fellow-Citizens, the moral life of the na- 
 tion being ever renewed, all advancement and timely 
 reform will come as comes the bourgeoning of the 
 tree from the secret force which fills its veins. Let us 
 each of us live, then, in the blessing and the duty of 
 our great citizenship, as those who are conscious of 
 unreckoned indebtedness to a heroic and prescient 
 Past : — the grand and solemn lineage of whose free- 
 dom runs back beyond Bunker Hill or the Mayflow- 
 er, runs back beyond muniments and memories of 
 men, and has the majesty of far centuries on it ! Let 
 us live as those for whom God hid a continent from 
 the world, till He could open all its scope to the free- 
 dom and faith of gathered peoples, from many lands, 
 
 79 
 
Oraiioji at New York. 
 
 to be a nation to His honor and praise ! Let us live 
 as those to whom He commits the magnificent trust 
 of blessing peoples many and far, by the truths which 
 He has made our life, and by the history which He 
 helps us to accomplish. 
 
 Such relation to a Past ennobles this transient and 
 vanishing life. Such a power of influence on the dis- 
 tant and the Future, is the supremest terrestrial privi- 
 lege. It is ours, if we will, in the mystery of that 
 spirit which has an immortal and a ubiquitous life. 
 With the swifter instruments now in our hands, with 
 the land compacted into one immense embracing 
 home, with the world opened to the interchange of 
 thought, and thrilling with the hopes that now ani- 
 mate its life, each American citizen has superb op- 
 portunity to make his influence felt afar, and felt for 
 long ! 
 
 Let us not be unmindful of this ultimate and in- 
 spiring lesson of the hour ! By all the memories of 
 the Past, by all the impulse of the Present, by the 
 noblest instincts of our own souls, by the touch of 
 His sovereign Spirit upon us, God make us faithful 
 to the work, and to Him ! that so not only this city 
 may abide, in long and bright tranquillity of peace, 
 when our eyes have shut forever on street, and spire, 
 and populous square ; that so the land, in all its fu- 
 ture, may reflect an influence from this anniversary ; 
 and that, when another century has passed, the sun 
 
 which then ascends the heavens may look on a v;orld 
 80 
 
The Nation at the Next Centermial. 
 
 advanced and illumined beyond our thought, and here 
 may behold the same great Nation, born of struggle, 
 baptized into liberty, and in its second terrific trial 
 purchased by blood, then expanded and multiplied 
 till all the land blooms at its touch, and still one in its 
 life, because still pacific, Christian, free ! 
 

 
 
 
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